Time for another “late monday afternoon” edition of obsession sessions from Chile, meet Tomas Vergara. I recently found out about  this amazing Chileans’ work through the awesome website Devour. Tomas, left his day-time job to follow his dream, and produce one heck-uv-an amazing short 3d animated film. Single-handedly. The film is one of the coolest, most inspiring indie animated films I’ve seen in quite a while. Recently, I was able to take a look into the mind of this talented young man.

I: What’s the earliest memory of a creative activity you did?

T: When I was a kid I used to draw cars. I had notebooks full of car designs. The main rule was to make original brands and models. It had to be something that didn’t exist. Obviously, at that age I didn’t think about originality or such things. Just made more sense to make stuff that did not exist.

I: If you weren’t doing what you do right now, what would you be doing?

T: I’d probably be doing film scores, racing on rally cars or drifting.

I: Inspiration, who? what? where?

T: Inspiration. Marketing gurus like Seth Godin, or big entrepeneurs like Steve Jobs. Filmmakers like Nolan or Spielberg. Sounds a bit obvious, but it is really inspiring to me how they started and how they are doing now. Makes everything feel so much closer. The fact that they share all their knowledge is very inspiring to me too.

I: Share any of piece your work, recent or old and talk about it.

T: I left my job because I wanted to make cool stuff, but we were producing crap and the people that owned it did not seem to care. Extremely short deadlines and terrible concepts from the agency. It was a very uninspiring work environment. There was, however, the money thing. Whatever you want to do, you need that. So I got in campaign of saving money, cut all expenses, and sell all the stuff that didn’t give me money, like my tv or my ps3. The short film was all that mattered.

After a few months, I left the job. If I was to make something that ambitious with a very tiny budget, I needed a place where I could stay isolated without any distraction. Went about 500 miles to the south, because it is cheap and a lot more inspiring to work. Rented a cabin in the woods, and there I stayed for the next 6 months.

There was some cool stuff to the project too, not all related to it, but to the whole experience.

• Learned to juggle clubs.
• Learned to animate
• Learned to rig a character
• Did read about 14 books, and I’m not a reader.
• Dropped about 60 pounds, I was overweight.
• At a given moment, I slept 5 hours a day for 3 weeks straight. My break was to have lunch, which I gave exactly 7 minutes. One day, I forgot to sleep and eat for about 30 hours. I almost pass out, and then got scared. If something happend, nobody would be there to know. Eventually I realized all that was counter productive.
• 40+ Blue Screens of Death
• 15+ light cuts (a lot of storms around there)
• 38 different stories written to produce in the future.
• 269 Shots
• 19,000+ Rendered frames
• Started to render in parallel 24/7 after 3 months of production, in the very same machine I was working on. Used 5 cores for that and worked with the 1 left.

I: Name 5 websites that you check often.

SlashFilm
BoxOfficeMojo
inc
floobynooby
GoodBrush