Love Tricycle is an animated short film I made between 2001 and 2003.In 1997, I started teaching computer animation part-time at Queensland University of Technology, which gave me access to some high-end hardware and software to feed my growing interest in computer animation, inspired in no small part by the recent release of Pixar’s first feature film, Toy Story. With the Australian computer graphics industry being very young at that time, opportunities to create computer-animated films didn’t really exist, so I wanted to see what I could do about that.

As a keen cyclist, I was looking at a bike one day and thinking how it could make an interesting animated character, standing upright, being mobile, and having a kind of ‘head’ in its handlebars. I’m also a fan of silent films with actors like Charlie Chaplin, where the body language does the talking and music carries the mood. As an exercise, I made a short animation of two bikes dancing a tango as their pet skateboard looked on. Gradually, I formed an idea of making a film about how these two lovers met. It was to be set in a world populated only by bikes, with ramps instead of stairs, and anything organic like grass or leaves replaced by green painted concrete and metal plates. I soon realised that I would need some funding to make a good quality film of the scale I was imagining. To cut a long story short, I was eventually awarded some funding and gathered a team to contribute story ideas, storyboards, concept art, music and sound. Around 2001 I was able to hit the pause button on all my other work for a while and devoted the next two years, almost full-time, to producing this film.

In October 2003, it was finally finished, and while I went back to work to replenish the coffers, I spent the next year sending Love Tricycle to film festivals around the world. It was selected by about 65 festivals and won 12 awards.

Watch Love Tricycle at Short Film Central

The Love Tricycle website has more information:
lovetricycle.com