From “Fuel For The Mind”, edition 1, La Cite des Enfants Perdus—Buf Compagnie 1995
(aka The City of Lost Children)

I remember watching this back in the old days when I worked at Softimage/Microsoft.
Many thanks to Miquel Campos for giving me this CD.

What’s this flea made of anyway? It’s not an electronic model, not a digitized photo, it’s a cute little chimera concocted in C. G. I., modelled, dreaded, and animated by his creators at the Buf Compagnie, using a mythological method of mathematics that took hundreds of hours on the computer.

The surface texture was obtain-ed by using several layers of lovely materials such as beach pebbles, green beans, snake skin, pig skin, leather, etc. The animators studied hours and hours of documentary films to find out how fleas act out there in nature. Now they know everything about how fleas hop, skip, jump, land, sting and drink, and do scores of dirty itchy tricks that have earned them a worldwide reputation.

Given the variety of shots where the flea would star, the animators modelled a series of fleas with varying degrees of definition. The most sharply defined had no less than 800.000 polygons.

Prix Ars Electronica 1996

City of Lost Children trailer