Tell us a bit about yourselves.

"Ectonull" animation studio was founded by two people: Gianni Caratelli and Marco Fantechi.

We started this adventure in 2003,when we decided to try to set up funny animations to make the girls fall in love with us. Unfortunately it didn't work, but we started to earn some money with those animations. So we started to think about animation as a business.

Ectonull is quite young then. How did you start the company?

When we decided to start Ectonull as a real studio about a year ago, we split all the costs 50:50 between us. Gianni bought a new computer and Marco brought his personal LightWave licence just to get going quickly. Setting up an animation studio in Italy is not so easy, you have a lot of fees to pay. Our lawyer is still working on it.

Where does the name Ectonull come from?

Ectonull is the name of the entity you can see in our logo; He's something like a rag-doll with inside a sort of "satiric soul".

It comes from two words: ectoplasm, something that you can't grab but that can play tricks on you and null, the element in a 3D environment that you can't see but that affects lots of things.

Ectonull is something that doesn't exist, that you can't touch, but that you can feel, as we hope, every time you smile seeing a short-movie of ours.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

Gianni saw LightWave in a magazine in 1990 and on a friend's Amiga 500. Marco saw it for the first time in late 1999, at a friend's studio.

When did you first start using it?

We start using it in 2002 (the discovery edition). Then we decided to buy the full licence.

What do you like about the package?

We like the white elegant box and... oh, sorry, you mean the package... ok... well, we like the extreme versatility of the software and its interface, easy to use.

We like to see LightWave as a real movie studio, kind of like "Cinecittà" (a famous Italian film studio here in Roma), with a section for the set up of the movie elements (Modeler) and a studio in which we can say "Roll camera and... action" (Layout).

So "Modeler" is the section in which we build scenes, characters and props and "Layout" is the place where all those elements meet the directors and build the movie.

Modeler is a great way to build characters and vehicles. Marco is very interested in "subdivision surfaces" and their history (he doesn't know much about it...).

Gianni is very interested in particles and effects in general and he thinks that the HyperVoxel is a very powerful tool. We are using radiosity for some experiments: LightWave has a great radiosity engine and it gives a wonderful feeling to the images (stills and animation too).

What could be improved for you?

Above anything else - Motion Designer. We find it quite difficult to use. Maybe something just for dresses. We think it has great potential, but it is not easy enough to set up.

We think that character rigging could be improved. It's a long and tedious process, we'd like to set up a character and its bones in a easier way, but that has been improved by LightWave [8].