Metro6
What is the film about?
Today is an important day for Zak, but everything is going horribly wrong. During his adventurous bus ride, Zak goes through a deeply personal metamorphosis.
Below the comedic surface lies a warning for all of us to not lose the importance of human connections. As Zak becomes more socially aware and appreciative of his diverse community, so do we.
A little background information...
In 1999, I saw Pixar’s Toy Story2. It was just truly wonderful, and I just didn’t know that a computer-generated film could make me feel that way.
Ultimately, I ended up going to Academy of Art University in San Francisco to study 3D Animation. At school, there were all these pictures of people that worked at Pixar or places like ILM, but if you fast forward to 2009, I was essentially working on pictures of digital cell phones rotating in 3D space. So instead of using my creative brain to work on light saber fights or creating alien worlds…I was working on the next Samsung.
I had a colleague at the time that would tell me about his daily adventures on public transit each day making it to work, and that was a call back to my childhood. Growing up in San Francisco, I was raised by a hard-working single mother. She probably worked 15 different jobs, and I started riding public transit alone by the time I was 8 years old.
Being exposed to so many people of different backgrounds, races, sexualities, professions, and ways of thought in such a small space…I felt that helped shape me into the person, and man that I am today. And I never met my father, so to a certain degree the people of public transit and the city of San Francisco helped raise me.
So, using that as a base, I thought “what if we gave someone a lifetime worth of experiences in an action-packed bus ride? Surely that would change that person for the better!
I decided to quit my job and started working on creating Metro6.
What is the film about?
How was the film made?
Metro6 utilizes an experimental hybrid combination of 3D animation with 2D animation hand drawn over the top of many shots. Metro6 is very detailed, and you can watch the film several times and easily see something new each time. It is a global collaboration of 78 people across 17 different countries, and while it ended up that way with a very diverse team scattered across the world, it certainly didn’t start like that.
Within 2-3 years of quitting that aforementioned job, I founded and co-ran a boutique Animation & Vfx company called “Hectic Digital.” In between live jobs, myself and other artists that were there at the time would chip away at creating Metro6. Production on Metro6 first officially broke ground in 2015, but by the tail end of 2017 it became clear that our small office of 13 workstations was not going to be enough to both support live work, and this incredibly ambitious side-project of Metro6 (with its 30+ characters, full city environment, and multiple sets).
At the start of 2018, we were incredibly fortunate to learn about a remote collaboration platform designed for the animation industry in Artella. We applied for the Beta program with Metro6 and ended up becoming a featured project on their platform. Their tools were incredible and allowed us to seamlessly collaborate with artists around the world, essentially expanding our office virtually and making the completion of Metro6 possible.
Over 800 emails later, we had team members from Spain, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, various parts of the United States, Canada, Philippines, Africa, just to name a few. There’s a full list at: http://metro6film.com/team/
These artists were like me in most cases: people that had dreams of having their work on the big screen but hadn’t gotten the chance. So Metro6 became a very special opportunity for all of us that wasn’t available anywhere else. Together we were able to create something wonderful forming our own sort of community and hopefully turn a couple heads.
In the 2 years we were on Artella 2/3 of the work on Metro6 was completed, and 95% of the animation was created on Artella. We rocketed through production in those 2 years and at the start of 2020, Metro6 was completed just in time for our World Premiere at the 63rd SFFILM!
Then covid happened, and you’ll have to read more to find out what happened next. Learn more at www.metro6film.com