Synopsis

A manic, Hunter S. Thompson-inspired narrator explains why he needs to buy Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" despite despising the author. The book is not for reading, however: it is the precise size needed to steady his wobbly desk. Rather than give his money to a giant online retailer, he chooses Good Books, whose profits support Oxfam. As his argument spirals into psychedelic visions of insects, flowers, animals and distorted human figures, the boundary between literary obsession and hallucination gradually disappears.

Factoids & Trivia

• "Metamorphosis" was created for Good Books, an online charity bookstore that passed its profits through to Oxfam.

• The film was the first entry in Good Books' "Great Writers" series, a collection of animated shorts inspired by famous authors and literary works.

• The concept came from String Theory, a New Zealand-based agency and production company. The project began with three possible scripts, but the Hunter S. Thompson-inspired piece made the strongest impression on the creative team.

• The production was made as an homage to Thompson's gonzo style rather than as a straightforward adaptation of Kafka's novella. The narrator's rant turns the book into an absurd household tool and a pretext for attacking corporate greed.

• Production ran from late June to November 2011, with roughly four months of work after allowing for pauses caused by other projects.

• The animation combined several techniques. The team used 3D, pencil tests, Flash, Photoshop and After Effects, choosing the method on a shot-by-shot basis.

• Only the transition from the book into flowers was created as a fully 3D morph. Other transformations were developed through hand-drawn animation and compositing.

• The sequence involving a tethered goat and hundreds of beetles was described as one of the most difficult parts of the production. The characters were built in CG, given illustrated textures, drawn over and then heavily composited.

• Antfood created the original music and sound design. Its approach deliberately blurred the line between soundtrack and sound effects, with the audio escalating alongside the increasingly unstable imagery.

• The project was treated as a creative experiment with unusual freedom. Antfood later described it as a milestone that helped establish its hybrid approach to music and sound design.

• The end result was promoted as a short animated spot as well as a music-driven film, with the song-like structure emerging gradually instead of arriving as a conventional track from the beginning.