“Wire Cutters” tells the story of two mining robots that are working off-planet and meet by chance. Although the sad robot invokes memories of the Wall-E classic at first, he has both a unique look and personality, and the story takes a very different turn as it unfolds.
The film was created by Jack Anderson as his undergraduate thesis project at Chapman University, and the story concept originally came from a question: “What would happen when two creatures of logic have to start making more and more human decisions?”.
From here many hours of work went into creating the film, which was animated in Maya, rendered in mental ray and composited in After Effects. The average render time per frame was about 30 minutes on a single computer, but was mainly done through distributed rendering on multiple machines at the university. Otherwise the nine minute long film would have taken nine months of constant rendering, at a rate of two seconds per day.
“Wire Cutters” was one of the seven finalists in the animation category of the Student Academy Awards this year.
