After moving in with my wife and being freed from the weekly commute, the rough story draft sat in my drawer for a couple of years. I was working on other short films and client projects, always postponing PATTERNS because of the character animation complexity and the many, many shots it would require — And because the commuting was still too fresh, too ordinary; it had to become more nostalgic in my mind before I could work on it again.

When I finally unleashed the draft from my drawer, I worked on storyboards and fine-tuning the story for several years on and off, always looking for music that would inspire me. Daily walks through Frankfurt, the Städel-Museum garden and along the Main river went by in a blur, my mind mulling over every aspect of the story until it was time for the first shot.

I tested a variety of different tools on how to tackle blending motion capture animations with hand animation to make working on all the train's and platform's passengers more streamlined, and did a lot of experimenting with the visual style of the film until I was satisfied it would hold up for over 100 shots.

Creating the look & feel of the different pattern-worlds, especially, was one of the most fulfilling and motivating things to keep me going.

Because this is a personal short film that I'm funding myself, I didn't have the budget to outsource the rendering of over 15.000 frames to an online renderfarm, and ended up rendering over 100 shots on my own computers that I've set up in our living room.

It certainly took a while and the heat from the GPUs kept us nice and warm during the winter, but I'm glad the noise is gone — for now.