Producing
The Spine took two years, with the first year devoted mainly to development. The film was a more ambitious project technically than
Ryan, and so required a much larger production team. Animators from Seneca College, which had been involved in
Ryan, played a much larger role in the making of
The Spine, with Seneca College people doing "about 95% of the animation," according to Landreth. Seneca professor Sean Craig, who had worked on
Ryan as a student, was an animation director on
The Spine. The film also utilized the input of C.O.R.E., including a team that did most of the computer rendering. The film was principally created using
Autodesk Maya and
Houdini 3D software. The
screenplay for
The Spine was written by Landreth while enrolled in a professional screenwriting workshop at
Ryerson Polytechnic University. Some of the story was based on what he'd seen, 20 years earlier, at a group therapy session for couples, where it seemed to Landreth that portraying a dysfunctional relationship would make for an interesting story. It took Landreth just two hours to put the outline together, but completing the story took a year. The Ryerson workshop helped Landreth to flesh out his story and as of 2009, he continues to meet with his writing group once a month. Landreth also credits the production teams from the National Film Board and Copperheart for their creative input. == Release ==