Why did you decide to make this film?
It originally started as an excuse to learn 3D animation, which was something I had always been interested in but had only played around with for about 6 months before starting the short.

Lucas Martell - Director of "Pigeon Impossible"

Five years is a long time, did you ever feel that you were not going to make it?
There were definitely quite a few times that I got really frustrated, like when we found other shorts that were very similar to ours. That actually happened two or three times but was purely coincidental. It was like finishing a script for a Pirate movie the day before Disney announced Pirates of the Caribbean. But I don't think I ever thought about giving up, at least not seriously. I put in a couple of years on the project at the beginning that put me past a point of no return. To give up would have meant that all that time would have been a waste. Then, when other people started chipping in to help out, that really sealed the deal because I just couldn't quit after other people had put in so much of their free time.

How much time and effort went to the story?
The story was definitely the most time consuming part of the process. I was pretty green when I started so a lot of the time was me learning how to simplify things and tell a clear and entertaining story. Scott Rice and Austen Menges helped out a lot by continually giving feedback and guiding me through the development process. Its amazing that they stuck with the project the whole way through, especially when you consider how horrible some of the early versions were. There's also a very different pace to shorts that takes a while to get used to. The goal is always to make it appear effortless, but its incredible just how much work goes into making it seem like it just happened naturally.

Can you tell us more about the challenges of making Pigeon Impossible?
Well we've pretty much covered the story issues, but obviously the technical side of things was a huge challenge. It would take forever just to list all the problems we ran into so I actually started a podcast dedicated to how we overcame some of the larger obstacles: www.pigeonimpossible.com/podcast One good example is the lighting and rendering. We only had two computers to process the frames, and the environment was so massive that we could barely even load it into memory. The solution for getting it rendered was to break things out into several different passes and put it together in compositing. It was definitely more complicated to do, but if we had tried to do in all in a single render, the machines would have choked and crashed. By breaking it up, we were even able to use some of the more expensive bells and whistles like raytraced reflections and area lights.

The film is complete and looks fantastic, How do you and your team feel?
We're all ecstatic. The festivals have been terrific and now that the film is online, its a huge relief to see that its gotten such a great response in the wider world. I was really worried that it might be viewed as a technical accomplishment rather than a piece of entertainment, but the vast majority of the comments have been about the story and the jokes.

What is next for Lucas Martell?
I've got a bunch of different things in the works. I'd of course love to do a feature, but I also have another animated short that I'll hopefully start once I catch my breath. I'd also love to do a live action short. Something very simple with just a few actors in a closed space. Spending a month on something like that sounds like a dream after 5 years for six minutes. :)