Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With A Kiss - Production

Production

Phil Nibbelink, a former Disney animator, revealed that he got tired of the "big industry merry-go-round" and wanted to start making films himself, where he had done independently two feature animated films before Romeo & Juliet: Puss in Boots & Leif Ericson: The Boy Who Discovered America. Nibbelink had began developing the film when he was finishing up Leif Ericson.

The film took 4½ years of animating and required 112,000 frames, each of which were completed in under 2 minutes), which were drawn by Nibbelink on a Wacom tablet directly into Flash 4, in combination with Moho. All the frames together were done in a month, by Nibbelink's prediction. The Moho software was used for the "over-the-shoulder" or the "listening" characters, or the crowd scene characters. The film was then put in another half of a year in post-production. Nibbelink used Flash 4 because when he had tried to migrate to Flash 5, it created forward-compatibility problems. Even cut and paste work using Flash 4 and Flash 5 launched at the same time created RAM issues and crashed.

Most of the actors of the film were his friends and children, which Phil recorded in a studio he built in his basement. The film's Spanish dub was originally done in Madrid. Phil revealed that the film was completely unscripted; "I would just take these silly improvs that my little daughter would do. I mean, lines like, she would say, ‘Babies – p-ew! I hate stinky babies!’ I said, ‘That’s hilarious!’ So I just would use it." Phil said.

Phil had decided that the film be a family-friend version of Shakesphere's original tale, because of more lack of G-rated films at the time.