User:BigRoyNL/Sandbox

Mac 'n' Cheese is an animated short directed and created by four students at the Utrecht School of Arts in the Netherlands. This roughly two minute animation took about five months to make, and about a bajillion peanut butter sandwiches.

Synopsis
When you find yourself running scared and running out of energy, there's only a few options left to outrun your opponent through the southern desert. Stopping at nothing, watch these two guys wear each other out and rip through boundaries hitherto unbroken. Enjoy the ride!

Production
For the creation of Mac 'n' Cheese a variety of software applications were used. Among them were industry standard applications like: Adobe Photoshop, Autodesk Maya, Eyeon Fusion, Pixologic Zbrush and TVPaint. Furthermore their technical director Roy Nieterau produced proprietary tools to help overall production. These tools were part of his master thesis titled "Pressure. Release. Animate" and the documenation of the developed tools is now freely available on the internet.

Marketing
Over a month before the actual film came out the official teaser trailer was released on vimeo.com, on June 16, 2011. CGfeedback.com and 3Dtotal.com were the first to plug the trailer on their frontpage. Within two weeks of the short’s official release on July 31, 2011, it reached over 700.000 views on Vimeo alone. Countless reposts and reblogs resulted in a viral, spreading around the world rapidly. On August 3, The Daily What chose Mac ‘n’ Cheese as the Animated Short of the Day On August 5, Bright.nl published a short on-line interview On August 8, Motionographer wrote an article about the film and its production. On August 11, 2011, aylives posted the first international interview, a BNR radio interview was broadcasted nationwide , Kotaku posted the short in their Top Stories section and Viceland posted an interview on their website. On August 12, 2011, a two page centerfold interview was published in a Dutch national newspaper, the NRC Next. On August 17, 2011, a short interview by filmkrant.nl was posted on their homepage.

Reception
Mac ‘n’ Cheese received mostly positive reviews. Just over 2 weeks it has been viewed almost 800.000 times on Vimeo.com. Serveral times the production quality has been compared with the work of students from Europe’s most prestigious animation schools, such as Supinfocom and Gobelins, both situated in France. The controversial part of this animation has had a few dozen unhappy remarks. Some viewers did not approve the use of substances portrayed in the short.

Soundtrack
The soundtrack of Mac 'n' Cheese (2011) created by Giulio Sterbini and Wouter Messelink was custom-made to fit the intense scenes of the film. Nevertheless because of the films popularity and the requests for a seperate soundtrack the directors of the film assigned Giulio and Wouter to the task of creating one. The release has been announced but no specific date has been set as of yet."For all the fans of the music track and the film's audio design! Giulio and Wouter are working on an extended version of the the track from the movie. We keep feeding them peanut butter sandwiches, so we expect an awesome soundtrack to be released in the near feature. But as of yet we can't set any specific date."