After the success with Illusions we started thinking of a new project, we wanted something more like a short film with a script and characters. It took several lunches before we came to the conclusion that we needed small animals that were easy to control, and didn’t run away as soon as we started to film. The only animal that fitted that and that we could get hold of was snails.
So, off to my girlfriends parents house and to the raspberry bushes. Under the leaves there were hundreds of snails, in all sizes. We collected some of them in a can. Then we drove down to a meadow close by to get some material for the set, we figured we wanted two different settings. We built the set at Hanes place, and started to film a documentary in Attenborough style. The story was something like that the snails was a bit like elephants, and when they were old and weak the traveled to secret grounds to die.
The two sets was first a jungle-set with a lot of moist vegetation and a desert set with sand and dry stuff. The snails started in the jungle set and started their travel towards the hole iron wheel in the desert. By minimal modifications of the set and different angles between shots we managed to get quite a few shots out of the small sets.
One negative side of using real material for the sets were all the tiny bugs that lived among the dirt and grass, some ruined the shots by running by and others wandered of on the floor. At the end of a days shooting we had all the shots we needed and carried it all outside in buckets and cleaned up.
A couple of days later I got a message on IRC from hanes, the disk where all the footage was stored had crashed, in a bad way. After finding some deep level data recovery software and running it he was able to save about half of the stuff, but the disappointment of losing soo much footage dampened our lust for working on the project and it was never finished.