The live action footage was shot in 2004 and even though the short has only recently become available to view Jasper only spent roughly two months to do the digital stuff adding gun flares, smoke and debris flying about for the first part of the movie. Over the next year or so, in between jobs, he and HC spent time figuring out no-budget squibs and fake explosives, and Jasper took on the task of doing the big finale sequence in full CG, modelling all the characters. For the last three months Jasper has spent a lot of time doing the CG scenes and animating them.

Interestingly, the reason that Picasso was replaced with a complete CG double towards the end of the film was because of the delay between shooting the original footage in 2004 and the point at which the latter part of the film needed to be worked on – a time during which the original pair of trousers that HC wore to portray Picasso had disappeared. It was a case of necessity being the mother of invention but it was also a good experiment to conduct.

Aside from various versions of LightWave being used for all 3D elements – from 7.5 to the beta of 9.2 - along with several plug-ins in Layout such as FPrime for rendering and Keycontrol for animating and plenty in Modeler specifically including WEdgeslide, dxs_SpinEdge+ and di Translate; Jasper used Syntheyes, an excellent tool for motion tracking; some fluids are Blender, some Realflow. Compositing is After Effects, Photoshop was used for texturing and Premiere for editing.

I asked Jasper how he'd managed to achieve the hair on Bob Ross and was surprised to learn it was neither Sasquatch, Fiber Factory nor another hair plug-in: "The afro is a pointcloned mess of spheres with a very minimalistic clipmap on it. Basically black and white noise. The beard is made out of a few thousand polygons acting as sprites that are pointcloned over the face geometry, with a combination of clipmap and transparency map."

The juxtaposition of the very real violence in the short and the toy guns merited further examination. Initially, Jasper did plan on replacing the guns with CG ones, but it was too difficult and there is no legal way to get a gun in the Netherlands - if you get caught on the street with a gun while shooting a film, even a fake gun that only looks faintly realistic, you face several months in prison. Toy shops are not allowed to sell realistic toy guns either. So for that reason Jasper made it a deliberate joke to use the most ridiculous, tiny toy guns possible, even down to the red caps on the end of the barrels.

Perhaps one of the best features of this film is the "making of" version showing the wireframes. I asked Jasper about it and he told me that if VFX are created correctly, most of the time an audience won't notice there were any to begin with. He added "I always like to see the extras about VFX you get on DVDs nowadays, so I figured there'd be an audience for it".