We won the award Best Performance Animation at the 1998 World Animation Celebration for this piece. We were up against entries from Modern Cartoons, MTV, and Westwood Studios, so I didn't think we had a prayer.

This piece was the first thing Lev and I did together at PZ. It was a free time piece we did over a long string of late nights, when no one was looking.

The birds were an experiment in wiring. I used a really experimental method I hadn't tried before, which I think gives them somewhat peppier, more expressive movement than we usually associate with motion capture. This is a line of experiments that began with Floops and that we're still continuing ("we" being the Wirists of Protozoa, who are myself, Dan Hanna, and Mike Morasky.) The birds method is unique (at least among what we've done in-house), but currently unwieldy-- so unwieldy I can't even articulate in words how or why it works. But if you take me out to coffee I can doodle diagrams on a napkin that will explain it. I'm looking for another excuse to try it again and make it cleaner and better.