Our intention was to work on a short, simple piece. As many of you know, sometimes personal projects evolve and take on a mind of their own. The story behind “All the Things” is quite a simple and modest one. It’s a story many designers and animators have experienced, starting a project and never finishing one. Looking at my hard drive one day I had about twelve animation ideas I really wanted to complete. I decided to team up with Chris Guyot, an animator friend of mine for a few years, and we thought we’d take the best parts of each story and just make that scene - make the money shot. That was our goal.
We pared the ideas down to ten, then nine and finally deciding to make eight short animated sequences. The next big hurdle was “how do we tie these together? How do we make it look like they all belong to the one piece?”. Our first idea was to have a “thread” running through each scene. We envisioned a thick thread passing through each scene. For the “Defence!” sequence it was going to be a along flag-like ribbon, the scene would cut to the forest and it would be long strips of bark running horizontally through the scene, same with the basement scene it was going to be a long strip of leather. The working title at the time was “A common thread”. We thought using a title like that and giving them all one thing in common might pull things together.