The Making of Cheese Soufflé

iSundae has a lot of odd scenes and characters that were drawn from our wild imaginations. But the one that always stands out is Cheese Soufflé. Often, after somebody sees the scene, we get the question, “How did you do that?”

Firstly, the computer mice were old, and an office was going to throw them away. It was about this point that I was hit by an idea. Why not combine a bit of old memories with these mice and create a fun scene? I rescued them and left them in the basement for the time being.

It was about this time that we had an idea: iSundae is a musical, so why not have the mice do a song? It made perfect sense. One problem. What would they sing?

I came upon the tune early one morning at breakfast. There I was, eating cold cereal, when I suddenly started singing a little refrain: “Cheese… Cheese soufflé.” Then came the first verse, made up on the spot. I sat down at the computer awhile later and wrote out a rough draft.

Cheese Soufflé was left alone for another month or so, until we reached the point in the script where we wanted the song. Then, it was pasted in, and we decided that the second verse wasn’t quite right. No problem. Rebekah fixed it up (she’s handy in that area), and we were set. Now we had our lyrics.

Rebekah and Ruth did a wonderful job making a set for the mice to dance on. I have no idea what went into that, so you’ll have to wait until they tell you about it. All I know about the set is that you shouldn’t fall on it (had some experience there, let me tell you…).

Recording the song went off without a hitch – sort of. There are seven people singing on that song, and somebody would mess up on every take. Finally, we got it. Now it was time to create some mouse animation.

We used some stop-motion software to capture frames from a camcorder onto the computer. If you haven’t heard of stop-motion, let me just say that it works like this: You take a picture, move the subject (in this case, that’s a mouse or mice), take another picture, move the subject, take a picture, etc. Animation runs at 24 frames (individual pictures) per second. Cheese Soufflé is 1:46 long. 60 seconds in a minute, so 106 seconds times 24 frames per second. We ended up taking 2,544 frames, not counting mistakes.

I hope I’ve given you a better understanding of what went into Cheese Soufflé, and I hope I’ve inspired you to make fun movies of your own.