Mac 'N' Cheese

If you’re ever being pursued on foot along a desert highway by a relentless, car-crushing beefcake, snorting a line of coke should give you the required boost to escape. Granted, it’s not your average situation, but Mac ‘n’ Cheese isn’t your average short.

“At the core our attitude was to go against the expectations on morals and story structure in animations and films nowadays. We were also very interested in making something intense, fast and awesome,” says Roy Nieterau, one of the four youngsters (including Tom Hankins, Gijs van Kooten and Guido Puijk) who collectively made the short film for their Utrecht School of Arts graduation project. He admits that style and impact was more important than storytelling. “There was no focus on the story, but more on how spectacular or sick the overall ride would be,” he says, adding, “we wanted to create something that would run well on the internet with hot topics nowadays like drugs, dubstep, intense animated chases and the painterly rendering style.”

The film’s polished cartoon style was mainly inspired by another animated short, Meet Buck, and online free-to-play computer game Team Fortress 2, a sprawling CG world where gamers design their own characters and endlessly chase each other around with every conceivable weapon from Molotov cocktails to scimitars. Although Mac ‘n’ Cheese replicates those chases, the result is less violent, explains Nieterau. “We could’ve created something much more realistic and put a generous amount of gore and blood effects in there, but that was totally not what we were aiming for.” What they were aiming for was “something incredibly intense that could even contain taboos while maintaining interest from a wide range of audiences”, he reveals.

You would think there would be a certain amount of real-life blood and gore among four young filmmakers arguing over creative vision, but he insists this wasn’t the case. “In the end I feel we all killed some darlings of our own, but the final product is a blend that all of us seem satisfied with.” In fact the biggest obstacles they encountered were slow computers and crashing software. “It was remarkable that throughout the production we never called each other names. Most curses were directed towards the software!” says van Kooten.

Since the film hit Vimeo, job offers have been flooding in. But the majority of the group are waiting for the right thing to come along that they can engage with in their new guise as animation studio Colorbleed. We might have to wait a while to see their next project but in the meantime you could always challenge them to a death match in Team Fortress 2. “Feel free to look me up, account name Revvels (in-game [RRR]Rev). We’ll see if my knife fits in your back – just kidding, I’m a terrible player,” professes van Kooten. Of course it’s important to state that shots doesn’t advise fuelling gaming sessions through drug abuse.