Magnificent obsession: filmmaker Jason Wen's determination to make an animation pays off.

in order to create an identity in a world of sameness, the hero of "f8," a beautifully realized animated film, runs into a building and steals a face. Creating a visible identity in a world of sameness is something Jason Wen, the director of this Film, will not have to worry about. His 13-minute animation has already garnered several awards: the Jury Honors Award at Siggraph 2001, Best Direction in Animation at the Hollywood Shorts Film Festival, and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention. And every inch of the film is his.

Starting with a script developed with his brother and concept art from fellow student Andy Jones, Wen created the entire film, adding an original score written by Casey Hess this summer. It took some four years--the last two and a half of them, full-time. He created it entirely on PCs with NewTek's LightWave, pmG's project:messiah, and Adobe Systems' PhotoShop and After Effects.

The idea for the film came to Wen in late 1997, while a junior at Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. "Initially, I wanted to create a good two-minute piece I could use to pad my demo reel," he says. But then he presented the idea to his brother, a writer, who expanded the story into a 15-page script. "The basic idea is that there's this world where identity is not allowed," says Wen. "They try to breed it out. But one character breaks into an area to gain an identity and makes a run for it. It's not all that complicated as a story." But it had become far more than a two- minute animation.

"I knew I could not finish this thing for a number of years," Wen said. When he told his parents what he wanted to do, they agreed to let him live at home after he graduated. "I don't think they believed it would take so long to do one animation," he says. "Eventually they realized and they stopped asking me how well it was going. But it took them two years."

He began, working outside of class, by drawing storyboards and designing and building models. "In 1998, I did a couple hundred 3-by-5 hand-drawn cards, scanned them all into the computer and made an animatic," Wen says. "But my ideas changed so much, I threw that out and haven't looked at it since." Then, he created a full 13-minute previz CG animatic using LightWave. "But the idea changed from that, too, so I threw it out."

Originally, he'd planned to have the main character break into the face vault with guns blazing, escape with guns blazing, and eventually get shot to death. "I started getting tired of the glorification of weaponry," he says. "I think that it's really easy to use weaponry, to use guns as a means to show action. I decided I'd approach it from a different angle. You see those big robotic commando dudes pursuing the main character with guns in their hands. But you never see them shoot him."

This change in attitude changed the script--and also his approach to the film. "My intention was to give an impression of what was going on," he says. I didn't want something that was clear-cut. I wanted it to be something that someone would sit and stare at."