Brian Hagan's project was being done for instructor Ruth Comley's class in 3D animation at The Art Institutes of Pittsburgh. The assignment called for students to take a regular object and give it character within a storyline. Hagan goal was more ambitious. "I decided to take 60 objects and give them character," said Hagan. "Sixty toy penguins."

The origin of Brian's project came from Richard Watson, programmer on the popular computer game Myst, who had a dream where he was king of the penguins, defending their ice cream against an opposing army of rabid penguins. This became a running joke amongst the gaming community, and, at the Mysterium convention in 2002, fans purchased about 50 toy penguin blocks, signed them, and sent them off to Mr. Watson. Those toy blocks would become the inspiration for the characters in Brian's animation project.

Brian recruited two classmates, Don Chesnut and Max Bagdasarov to work on the project with him. Work began with cutting the music from the 1979 radio production of War of the Worlds down to the length of the animation. The track on the CD was just under ten minutes long, and the original edit came in at four minutes. The team was ready to proceed with that, but the instructor gave them their first reality check.

"Ruth told us to cut it down more," said Brian. "I'm very thankful she told us that." Using Adobe Premiere, the group edited the music down to a more manageable two and a half minute length.

The story was then worked out to match the audio cues in the music. Scenes were divided up, audio cuts matched to animation cuts. The team storyboarded out the animation in Photoshop. The setting was to be a kitchen, with a radio speaking the introduction taken from the War of the Worlds music, followed by the war among a great many penguins.

The team then began working on models of the objects in the animation. Using Discreet's 3D Studio, Max worked on the models for the kitchen table and counter, radio, and the kitchen appliances while Don modeled the sixty penguins that would fill up the kitchen. Brian and Don then created an animatic, a limited 3D animation to test camera angles and lighting with boxes where the models would eventually stand.

With the animation sketched out, the team turned to rigging the penguins, taking the models of rigid objects and modifying them to move and bend. Everything was then put into the final setting for animation. The final steps were editing, using Premiere, and compositing, using Adobe After Effects.

Work on the project took the full quarter. The result, Brian laughed, was an was that he received an "A." The animation is available at Fantastdesigns..

"We watch it now and cringe at the mistakes and glitches," said Don, "but there were a lot of things that really worked. It had the feel we wanted, and people laughed and applauded at the right moments."

Brian and his team worked on the animation at the school and at their homes, using both their personal PCs and, more often, the school's HP workstations, loaded with the software the students needed and ISV certified for their use. Using the HP workstations, Brian said, was great for the project. "I have only good will towards the workstations. We never had technical problems and they hold their own, despite the beating they take."

That beating comes from the inevitable treatment of computers in a school lab environment. School workstations are subject to far greater stresses than any personal computer. "The fact that we have hundreds of students going at them every day really takes a toll, wears them down," Brian admits, implicating himself and his fellow students. "It's a lot of punishment for a system."

Workstations at The Art Institutes must survive the ministrations of a great number of anonymous users with no personal incentive to treat the machines as they would their own computers, subjecting them not only to the demands of performance-straining tasks, but also to some harsh physical abuse. The conditions, to say the least, aren't optimal for longevity. Each school's technical support staff, comprised of employees and students, has to keep on top of system maintenance, with the help of HP support lines.