Annie & Boo is a landmark student short film incorporating a fresh concept and engaging dialogue carried by classic cartoon animation and rich, vibrantly-lit scenes. The film has featured in dozens of film festivals around the world and received widespread acclaim from all sections of the industry. CGNetworks interviews 27 year-old German film-school graduate, Johannes Weiland, the creator of this award-winning short.

CGN: Tell us your story, how you got into animation, how you got to Filmakademie, and what are you doing now.

I finished school in 1996, but having always been interested in animation/model making I decided from there to study animation. From 1998 to 2003 I studied at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart, Germany. During my studies I directed the animated short Hessi James, which won several awards at international festivals including a Student Academy Award nomination. Since my graduation with Annie & Boo in mid 2003 I've been working as a freelancer for Studio AKA in London and Studio SOI in Stuttgart.

CGN: What's the story behind Annie & Boo? How did you come up with the film and what inspired you?

The film is about a girl, Annie, who meets Boo, a real coincidence. He's a creature, living in our human world, but hiding himself pretty well, so nobody has ever seen him before. He's causing happenings that appear to us as coincidence.

There were different sources leading to the story. I was interested in telling an emotional character-driven story, because I haven't seen that very often in 3D animation until now. I thought it's more exciting if it is a story between a human and a fantasy character. Then Jakob Schuh, who was co-writing, had this idea of living coincidences and this seemed to be an interesting idea to build a story on.

CGN: What specifically were you trying to achieve with the story of Annie & Boo?

We were telling the story of a romance and allowing the characters to show emotions.

CGN: Can you elaborate on the concept designs for the main characters, Annie and Boo?

While writing the story we started working on the character designs. Annie was not a big problem; Jakob did one drawing and I was happy with it. For Boo he did about 500 drawings to get something that we both liked. Annie & Boo is based on the idea of personified coincidences living in our human world but hiding themselves very well. They cause happenings which appear to us as coincidence. To have found this explanation of a character didn't mean that we knew what it should look like. While writing the script every one of us had a different vision of Boo. First we had this idea that a coincidence should look weird and confused and funny, but then we realized that he still is the leading role of the film, that he must be able to show emotions so the audience and Annie can feel sympathy for him. So we went back a little bit to a more human look.