preparatory phase, the game's production began in September 2003. Publisher SCEI gave the project a greater amount of development time, funding and creative freedom in comparison to the resources of the Ico team, measures that arose from the company's recognition of that game's critical success. Kaido also noted that he and Ueda endeavored to expand the production with newly recruited staff. They sought out prospective collaborators, particularly artistic specialists, through job advertisements they had distributed across the Japanese trade media and via word of mouth publicity. From a pool of five hundred applicants, ten were subsequently enlisted to work on the game; however, Ueda felt that only one or two satisfied his criteria, as he expected every facet of the title to be as well-crafted as possible. Kaido's concern during production was to guarantee Team Ico's ability to meet their schedule and budget commitments while ensuring that they had the opportunity "to create everything Ueda was aiming for within the amount of time we had". Kaido remarked that his colleagues needed to "start transitioning into full production", as they had devoted extensive efforts to the preparation of the game's technology. Initially, the team was unable to ascertain the level of sophistication with which they could materialize their ideas in the game. Character designer Shinpei Suzuki recalled that they started to develop the game in an experimental fashion and made progress through trial and error. As the team began, the designers issued instructions that outlined the programmable properties of the colossi enemies–along with the means of their defeat–and that were meant to be gradually implemented into the title. The process in which the staff attempted to introduce those concepts typically led them to encounter problems with their realization, which entailed a revision of previously submitted work. According to Kaido, during the development of the colossi the team struggled to choreograph certain motions of the enemies in line with the expectations of the personnel. To remedy this defect, Team Ico reworked their original programming solution that animated the movements of the colossi in the game. Suzuki described the team's early accomplishments as empirical; in the aforementioned period, the staff would routinely test and adjust the game's anticipated components until confirming them to function properly. To plan out the design the game's visual elements, Ueda used 3D computer graphics software instead of sketching them on paper. His rationale was that the necessity to