By Brad Cook Imagine a lowly paper clip. Nestled among its 499 metallic brethren, it sits in a standard issue cardboard box waiting to perform its office duty. But what if that clip aspired to more than fastening a sheaf of papers? What if it decided to take a leap into the larger world beyond the office supply shelf? That is the premise of Paper Clips, a 10-minute film due to premiere on the Internet soon from Mac-centric production company Creative Forces. The QuickTime Movieplex “My calling has always been filmmaking,” says Creative Forces founder Lee McCaulla, whose previous short film, Loose Tooth, qualified for Oscar consideration in 1997 and who graduated from a successful career as an animator for Disney and Warner Bros. to strike out on his own. He continues: “I first discovered QuickTime in 1991, and I just thought it was the coolest thing I had ever seen. With it I could watch perfectly synchronized video and audio on a computer without any extra hardware. “Eventually, it dawned on me that this was the future. I mean, look at the potential, the millions of people you could reach through the Internet with QuickTime.” That future is now. McCaulla plans to distribute Paper Clips as a QuickTime movie via the Creative Forces web site. He likens his idea to the nickelodeons that were popular in arcades during the early 1900s. Back then, viewers dropped a nickel in one of the machines and cranked a handle to see several seconds of a crude short film. “But what if we took that concept a step further?” he asks. “What if we employed Hollywood-like fidelity into an original, quality-made piece and let people download it for a small fee? So I took where Hollywood began and where Hollywood is now and put them together to create what Hollywood might become in the future.” An Unlikely Character With a means for distributing a short film in place, McCaulla found inspiration for his project while waiting in line at the Post Office with a stack of clipped film festival entry forms during his promotion of Loose Tooth. “I started to fiddle with one and I realized that this thing could be a character,” he recalls. “One that really lends itself to the medium of computer animation.” Despite the main character’s simple appearance, however, it was not easy to animate, as art director Reuben Brunson recalls.		“Animating the actual paper clip was quite a chore. I guess we should have done tables or a thumbtack,” he says with a laugh. “The problem with the paper clip is that it really doesn’t have a body. It’s just a curved tube and there’s no solid mass in the middle that allows you to move the figure around.” “Anatomically speaking, he’s like a one-legged man,” adds McCaulla. “That was the original model anyway. These paper clips essentially have one appendage that they hop around on, and they have their two arms.” Evolution of the Tale Just as tricky was the story itself, which went through a variety of permutations before becoming a parable about leaving the nest. “He’s kind of a brave little fellow,” McCaulla says of the main character. “When I animate him, I try to imagine what he’s thinking and feeling in a given scene. Sometimes he’s shy, or utterly terrified, but there’s an element of daring to this character. It’s a fun range to play with.” “We worked together on the whole process of building the treatment and then going to storyboards,” Brunson adds. “I can’t tell you how many times those storyboards changed. We bounced a lot of ideas back and forth. What sort of goals does this paper clip have? What kind of predicaments can we get him into? What kind of character traits would make him special? “It was the same process as making a full motion picture, but just on a smaller scale.” Ambient Sounds To play the few humans who have dialogue on the film, McCaulla cast Cam Williams as a voice actor. While the anthropomorphic paper clip doesn’t speak, Williams was able to also use his talents to bring the main character to life. “There’s no cheesy talking,” explains McCaulla. “The paper clip emotes ambient sounds like sighs or cheers or laughter. [Other than that] it’s a pantomime piece. When he droops forward, you can tell he’s sad. When he jumps up and down you can tell he’s excited.” He continues: “Walt Disney once called animation the ‘plausible impossible.’ Here you have these paper clips that are moving around and alive with personality, but your brain is telling you that this can’t be happening. Sometimes it’s actually kind of creepy to watch.” Only One Way to Go A variety of software was used for modeling, animating and rendering (see Creative Process sidebar), with the final export completed in Premiere, which McCaulla has been using since he completed Loose Tooth’s hand-drawn animation on his old Macintosh. As Creative Forces grows, however, software upgrades are inevitable. “We will use Final Cut Pro on our next project,” McCaulla affirms. “I’ve seen the interface and it’s like glass. It’s a very slick application that I’m totally in love with.”