Remove hind legs
before consumption

format	animated short film
Technique	2D/3D
Length	3‘56’’
directed by	Finn Meisner, Leslie Herzig & Lukas Wind
Music	Leo Brennauer
Software	Blender, DaVinci Resolve
Production	Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
year	2022

synopsis

In an insect food farm, millions of crickets are being bred, frozen, packaged and fried. The ordinary everyday process in the farm is a one-time catastrophe for the crickets and usually ends with their certain death. Nevertheless, one cricket survives and escapes.

See full credits here.

Storyboard

The panels for the first act of the film.
Read from left to right – or sip through the slideshow below.

Color Script

A comparison of storyboard, color script and final picture (extracts).

Character Design

Lovely crickets, all drawn by Leslie Herzig.

Concept Art

If we were to found an insect food start-up with the machines we invented, we'd probably fail. But our designs convinced us enough to keep them in the film.

Animation

Rough animations for the characters were done in TV Paint, clean-up and all the FX animation directly in Blender's Grease Pencil tool.

Modelling

All 3D modelling done by Finn Meisner.

Compositing

The before and after of different shots and how they'd look from a different perspective.

Unloved ideas

A collection of all the things that didn't make it: Cricket revolution, cricket plague, veteran grandma, fried cricket larvae, fake infomercial, crickets with cow pattern, bum-on-the-street-cricket with apocalypse-is-near-cardboard.
And of course, business cricket. We miss you all.

Credits