"Day Off The Dead" was created by a team of a dozen animtors spread out over North America. Hash Animation Master was used for the 3D, Photoshop for texturing, and AfterEffects for compositing. Here's an example of how one vignette was created...

"French Sex" started out as a storyboard -

The "French Sex" set was based on photographs taken in New Orleans especially for the project. In fact, the photos were combined, cleaned up, and converted into Targa textures first, via Photoshop -

- and then built out as a 3D environment second, via Animation Master -

The characters went through many phases. Concept art, model sheets, static 3D model, rigged 3D model, textured 3D model... Here's a progression of Dead Guy -

The characters were animated within the 3D environment. There were many passes to the animation, and many revisions along the way. Once the animation was "finaled," the vignette was rendered out as multiple elments, and composited together in AfterEffects. Shadows and special effects, such as lens flares and glows, were often added at this point. Here's a snapshot of an AfterEffects screen -

All the work, up to this point, was created on a variety of PCs running Windows 2000. The film was cut, however, in Final Cut Pro on a Mac G4. The sound and music was ultimately created by Juniper Music & Sound Design in Dallas. The film was transferred to BetaSP in Las Vegas by Media Underground. "Day Off The Dead" will be shot out to 35mm in December by DVFilm in Austin.

Ultimately, "Day Off The Dead" required 2 years of production, 80 gigabytes of ftp storage space, more than 40,000 rendered elements, and more than a few late nights. Was it worth it? You betcha'.