Of course, it was way more than luck that took their animated short, Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot, to this year's Sundance Film Festival. Chai and a team of 20 student volunteers devoted most of last summer to working on the film, which was completed in just 55 days.

"That's a really short amount of time," Chai says. "A lot of the pre-production stuff was done over the past year, but when it came down to the summer, we knew we had to finish it before school started. So it was just sort of a deadline we had to meet."

Each summer, Chai works on an independent film project. He got the idea for Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot from a student who really does have an accident-prone foot.

"Her name is Fumi Nakamura and weird things have happened to her foot," Chai says. "She's actually had scissors stuck into it. She's gotten it stuck in a bicycle wheel before, and one of her legs is longer than the other one, and lots of weird stuff has befallen her foot. When she mentioned that in class one day, I thought that would be a good inspiration for a film, using it like a superpower."

Chai and student volunteers from SJSU's animation/illustration department created Fumi at the university over the summer. Another San Jose-based institution, Adobe Systems, also had a hand in the film's creation. Students used Adobe software they had won in the 2005 Adobe Design Achievement Awards for another short animated film, Neighborhood Roots.

Chai did many of the film's key drawings, in order for the film to have a uniform appearance. The drawings were then scanned into the software.

Chai recalls many long days in which work on the film started at 7 or 8 a.m. and lasted until midnight. Fumi, like most independent films, was a true labor of love for Chai and the students. Aside from the Adobe software, Chai footed the bill for the film's production costs, including catering.

"They worked for Costco pizza, Vietnamese sandwiches and Taco Bell," he says of his student production staff.

"The film was made with no budget, by students who were just volunteering their time out of love of the craft and the project," Chai says. "They volunteered their summer vacations just to help out on something. They didn't know if anything would come of it, but they did it just out of love of animation."

All the summer's hard work was further vindicated when the film was accepted to the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. Fumi has been submitted to other festivals, as well, but it just happened that the Sundance deadline fell close to the film's completion, so the festival was one of the first ones to which the film was submitted.

What makes the film's appearance at Sundance more impressive is the fact that the festival has no separate category for animation, which means that Fumi competed against about 4,300 other entries for its spot.

"We were completely surprised; not that we don't think our film is good, but so many films get submitted, and it's just such a prestigious festival. We had to double-check the caller ID," Chai says, laughing.

Of course, the film's acceptance to Sundance was for real, and Chai and more than a dozen of the student volunteers attended the festival, which was held in January in Park City, Utah. Initially, because lodging close to the festival tends to be pricey, Chai and the students were planning to stay about 45 minutes away in Salt Lake City, with about 15 students planning to spend nights in the basement of one student's family's home there. But Adobe helped the filmmaking team find accommodations in Park City. The software company also lent them a hand in acquiring tickets to screenings, which are often so scarce that the filmmakers weren't even initially assured of being able to attend the screening of Fumi. During the festival, Chai and his team attended other screenings, and several parties. They also presented several workshops about the process of making Fumi.

"It was really weird, but really cool at the same time," Chai says of his time at Sundance. "It was my first time to attend the festival. It was really overwhelming--all the stuff we were doing and got to do."

Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot also recently screened at the Cinequest film festival in San Jose. Chai is planning another independent film project for this summer.

For more information about "Fumi and the Bad Luck Foot," visit www.thunderbeananimation.com.