Fortunately for me we had a few skilled people, the production manager and a character animator. The rest of the team was fairly inexperienced. Towards the end of the schedule the experienced animator moved to Australia and I couldn't get any more work out of her.
One of the most difficult things you can do in a film is accurately depict a real animal next to and interacting with humans. In recent years this has become more commonplace in big films, but this was over 10 years ago, with a small inexperienced team. Given the challenge of these shots I think we did quite well.
