Our influences and references for this project were Pixar’s Up, Moonbot's The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore for the look and the concept is strongly inspired from the movie Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. These kind of stories with this concept of a time loop and unexplained ‘time travelling’ are very enjoyable. But at the same time it was a challenge because it imposed a lot of constraints. At the beginning, it was planned that their character would interact with his environment. Meaning he had the ability to change things to avoid the accident, for example: locking the door to prevent his double going out and being hit by the bus. “That was a good idea but we were unable to conciliate this with the concept of the accumulation of characters in the scene,” explains Fabien. “But the basic idea stayed the same. The character had to change his behavior to avoid his tragic fate.”
They even managed to finish the movie on time! During the first stages of pre-production, Fabien did a useful view ahead to the different obstacles they could meet. “One of the advantage of this kind of story is there is only one character, copy-pasted five times,” Fabien notes. “Our biggest challenge was to find a coherent and relatively quick end to the story. It could have gone on forever really. The character Hubert had to quickly work out a way to solve his problem. He finally quits his little routine and understands the importance of enjoying simple things like, for example, a sunset.