According to Phil Tippett, lots of work on the film was done on Saturdays by students who wanted to get some filmmaking experience. The scene with the mountain of dead soldiers was done by melting thousands of little army men together on wire, and it took six people three years to complete the scene.
This fully stop-motion animated film was Phil Tippett's pet project. More than thirty years in the making, he started working on it in the late 1980s after making RoboCop 2 (1990), but considered abandoning it when Jurassic Park (1993) was released, and CGI animation seemed to make stop-motion a thing of the past. However, after some urging, he started a Kickstarter campaign that allowed him to finish the movie.
Over the years, Phil Tippett released three short clips of this movie, which made up about half of the full 82-minute version that was eventually screened at various film festivals.
Around the first quarter of the movie, a robots' graveyard can be seen in the background of the character. Amongst the abandoned machines an ED-209 from Robocop can be seen.
In a 2022 interview, Phil Tippett provided some specific insight into the years-long process of making the film: "Sometimes, on the weekends, I would get as many as like, 15 to 20 people to come in, and these were people that I'd picked up giving talks around the Bay Area and whatnot. Most of them didn't have any experience working with tools and so I would spend, during the week, a little bit of time figuring out what the processes would be, and then on the weekends when they would show up, I would show them. I couldn't have done it without them because a lot of the stuff was so involved and tedious. One of the sets was these hills and mountains of dead army men, or soldiers, and that took between 4 and 6 people over 3 years to build."