We are proud to announce that we have hit the 100th festival mark with our short film “she who measures”
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Archive for the ‘Festivals’ Category
100 festivals!
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009more tests
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009Hi guys!
Here is the latest test for the stop animated burning of wood animation.
As you can see, we will be using this animation in interesting and disturbing ways in the film:)
and the winner is….
Saturday, October 10th, 2009Hi friends!
The time has come to say goodbye to the Balkanima festival, and to friends we found here in Belgrade!
The last day of the international competition proved to be crucial, providing us with the GRAND PRIX winner of the festival- The film ENTER PARADISE FOR 3,30 Euro by Edith Stauber, the Austrian author has united us, in a unanimous vote for the grand prix award.
I think it was wonderful how the author captured the simple pleasure of a dull afternoon at the local swimming pool, in all its ugly, dull , human glory, accompanied by the ring tones of mobile phones left unanswered while its owners basked under the hot rays of the sun.
I felt the film represented the spirit of the festival in its style, approach to animation and subject.
Unfortunately, a few good films got passed by this year, and this is mostly because the format of the Balkanima festival celebrated and promoted a different look and style then shown in those films. My unofficial tip of the hat goes to our friend Moritz and his film “URS”, which i feel is a great first film which deserves to be on the winners podium. It was a film which the audience recognized, awarding it with a huge applause.
Tomorrow we go to Zagreb, where we will present our work in progress of our upcoming film to the trustee for Animated film Darko Bakliža. Just one more step to finishing our film, which i hope will find itself on the program of the 2010 instalment of Balkanima. I know i will be here, since i have the honour to be invited to hold a workshop in a years time at the BALKANIMA 2010. This means that this is not a goodbye, but rather until we see each other again Belgrade and Balkanima.
Balkanima day 03
Friday, October 9th, 2009Hi to all!
Today started off with the second meeting between the jury members, to discuss the program so far. We have managed to narrow down the films shown so far to a couple we think are in the race for the grand prix and the various diplomas. I am happy to report no large quarrels or arguments between us in the process. I hope the upcoming days will prove to be as good.
Since five international competition programs had to be shown in a four day span we had quite a long day with two programs shown back to back from 6-10 in the evening. In those hours we saw allot, producing more interesting shorts then the days before. To keep the list short i will mention the interesting animated film with a comic book feel, that we came to expect and love from the french-FARD.
The film managed to show us how rotoscope does not have to be the ugly sister of animation and can be utilised as a weapon rather then a crutch.
Our Slovenian neighbours produced a short animated film with an interesting render and animation, reproducing in 3d brilliantly the traditional puppet animated visual and style. The film is “Chicory n coffie”
To say a few words and put the festival in its context. Belgrade is a beautiful place to visit and will keep you with your eyes opened if you can navigate the irregular and frustrating buses or opt for a taxi which is not expensive if you can split it with fellow travelers. The Serbian people so far have been open hearted and great hosts. Although it is not a town made to the measure of a vegetarian, this and perhaps other short comings have been amply compensated by the hospitality and good heartedness of our hosts and friends we got here in Belgrade.
We had the opportunity to see the exhibition of the film stills and concept art for the most expensive feature animated film made in Serbia. The film is called “Edit and I” The stills looked brilliant, and showed a lot of promise, but i am always a sceptic with film made in this region, because as big as the budget might be (and i dont know), i guess it was not enough forcing the author to condens the natural 4 year production time into a two year marathon. I cant help but think how did this effect the final quality? Well, hope i will be shown wrong when i get the chance to see the film, which should be any time now, cos the film is finished and is in theaters in the region
Balkanima 2009 day two
Thursday, October 8th, 2009Hi friends,
The second day of competition here at Balkanima continued pretty much as the first- Most of the films filled the average category, in my opinion, allowing for a few surprises. These would be the great first time film and effort from the German young animator Moritz Mayerhofer, who’s final work at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg , short film “URS” shows great promise and is a film which i tough stuck out in the last nights competition-You can read more on the film on the blog, a few posts down.
Besides this, i was captivated with the animation and visual style of “wings and oars”, by Vladimir Leschiov, but felt in the end the story let down the otherwise great effort by the Latvian author.
This year, the festival itself is housed at the Student city in New Belgrade- As i understand, this has been its home for all the years, execpt the first two.
With the usual Serbian sense of humor the festival director extended his hat, asking for donation to fill up the poor pockets not of the festival, but of the government, elaborating that they obviously need help:)
I feel the venue was a good choice as far as the number of people attending the festival, with the theater filed up rather good, but unfortunately the projections suffered- The entire program was played from DVD and the sound could have been better- Lets hope this will be rectified in the following days, or at least for the next years instalment!
BALKANIMA 2009
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
With our film winning the GRAND PRIX at BALKANIMA 2008, I had the honour of being invited to come to BALKANIMA 2009 as a jury member for the international competition program. The jury consists of 2 more members- one of them being mr.Priit Parn, who we all know and respect
mr.Parn has been active as a caricaturist and illustrator since the end of the 1960’s. He has done more and more work as a freelance graphic artist since the early 1980’s. Pärn has had over 30 solo exhibitions over the past 12 years in various European countries and Canada.
Pärn has made 10 animated films of duration up to 30 minutes as well as a host of short films, commercials..
The third jury member being mrs.Maja Volk- Serbian writer, singer, drama professor and play-writer, who delighted us all with the live performance of her Fado band at the opening ceremony.
To go straight to the opening night films, I would single out the brilliant MUTO, of whom i have spoken often on this blog, and an intriguing film 
Malban- a french author Elodie Bouedec, portrayed a dream like world of distant memories with a distinctive stile and poetic sensibility.
Stay tuned for the next five days, where i will try and write a few words after every day of this fine balkan festival.
Pixar at FMX09
Saturday, May 9th, 2009Hello!
It has been a busy day at FMX09 and TrickFilmFestival here in Stuttgart. Sad news…Unfortunately, we did not win the Bosch pitching forum prize. The “compot collective” and their “Father” animated documentary project took first prize. It looks like a very interesting project and i wish them all the best!
Moving on, I had a blast yesterday,watching a lot of cool conferences (”directing in the 21 century”, “plankton invasion”…),but first i have to give a big thumbs up for the new film by Adam Elliot called “mary&max,” a claymated feature film from the creators of the Academy Award winning short animation HARVIE KRUMPET.
At the FMX09 one film presentation caught my eye. This was the presentation of the upcoming feature film by toons´n´tales called Jasper the pinguin. Its and 8 million euro production based in Germany. The film is for small children so it is a bit slow, but the visuals are really great. They have managed to produce an innovative and unique 3d look.
Besides this, the Pixar presentation of the cinematography for Wall-e was very interesting. It was packed, everybody went- and i was there as well. Danielle Feinberg from pixar talked about the crazines of the pixar people:) What else can you say for people who track down directors from films they liked as reference for their new project, and ask them what lens they used in a film 10 years ago, so they can replicate this detail…The look they wanted was an 60’s and 70’s science fiction. Besides this they wanted to have a documentary feel for all the shots on earth. As Danielle sad, a “found film”- like something you stumbled up in one of the garbage towers. This they achieved with replicating the camera settings and feel of these movies- One of the things they noticed was the depth of field blurring. They felt it had something their computer replicated camera lacked. The tech guys said this was not true-their cg cameras had all the parameters of the real camera.So in true Pixar style, they went and build a set with a plastic Eve, shot some live footage and gave this to the tech guys.
The difference was visible, so they went and fixed that.You will notice in the movie that the camera is not following the action perfectly. This was done to create a documentary feel to the camera movement. In this way you dont get a staged feel to the scene. Again, in true Pixar style the moved the classical cg camera pivot from the center of the camera to the bottom of the camera, to replicate how someone would hold a real camera- See if you can notice this:)
An interesting bit of information-In the first stages of the film making, Wall-e was thinner and more elegant, but they decided that he was too wimpy and would not survive 700 years alone, so they beefed him up in the final version.
What pixar changed in the way they approach film making in this movie, was in the animatic and rough layouts. Usually the animators would get rough layouts with no lightening. In Wall-e they would setup the light much earlier in the process in order to give the animators a better sense of how the scene will look in the end. In this photo the upper image is from the layout phase and the bottom image is from the finished movie.
Well, hope you found this little overview interesting!
Today im flying back home, so this is my last post!
Pitching and FMX09
Friday, May 8th, 2009Hi to all!
Well, this is my second day here in Stuttgart. Unfortunately I was not able to see many films today because I had engagements regarding the Pitching forum to which we were invited to. The idea is to present your work to producers in order to find German coproduction and present the film to the Robert Bosch Foundation. This foundation will award the best pitch with 70 000 Euros next year at the final pitching event. The winner of the Stuttgart pitch will directly go to the final of his pitching session which will be held in July next year.
The important note is that there are still 4 places left for the final pitch and for these anyone can apply, so send in your projects!
It has been great to hang out with the other animation teams, some of which you might know like Milen Vitanov, author af a great short „my happy end”.
Besides this, with Alexey Alexeev (KFJG n0.5) in the jury you know you will have a laugh.
The great thing about Stuttgart film festival is the partnership with MFX09, the 14th international conference on Animation,Effects, Games and digital media
I personally really enjoyed the presentations I had the opportunity to visit. I will single out The Art Direction and
Lighting of “Bolt” byPaul Felix and Adolph Lusinsky, the art director of Bolt who talked about the idea behind the visual style of this latest Disney animated film.This is a short brakedown of the presentation:
The main inspiration for the look of the film was the Ashcan school of painting. Their approach to depicting the details of real life and their use of light to create the atmosphere and mood of the painting.
This basicaly meant a look based on loose visible brush strokes and massing of detail. What this means is that the blades of grass melt into a single green color as they move away from the camera. Besides this they wanted softer less defined edges on the foreground elements.
They invented rendering techniques to achieve this and from the tests they shown it worked perfectly, creating a real paintery effect and the loose brush stroke. The plug-in and rendering techniques would drop details from the parts of the image that were in shadows and from the background textures and elements.These ideas combined created a wonderful render. I was impressed:)
Unfortunately they have toned down this visual for the final film and in my opinion lost a lot of the unique visual style shown in the test renders.
What blow my mind is that allot of the models that ended up into he film were low poly game like models (especially for the buildings).This had sufficient details for the background elements which the art director wanted simplified and consisting of broad strokes of color. Off course this meant that you would have low poly models for the set dressing and high poly models for the main elements.
Sorry for the poor image quality but the iphone is not blessed with a better lens..
Allot of the influence for the visuals in Bolt came, as they said, from the American movies of the 1970es, from authors such as Gordon Willis.
you decide for your self but, in my opinion they had a great concept that got watered down in order to make the film appealing to a broather audience. I can only hope someone from Disney will take the idea and make a cool short film
Opening night spiked with contraversy
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009Hi to all!
Here i am in Stuttgart for the Festival of animated film.The festival just started yesterday but from the opening night i can see that i will enjoy these few days. We have been invited to this festival for the pitching forum where we will present our new project “An old woman and a dog”. I will talk more on this later on.
The first international selection shown just how strong the competition will be. I would single out This way up (this years Oscar nominee), which was my first chance to watch the film. I loved it:) and apart from a few films i have already mentioned from previous festivals i would have to say that ORGESTICULANISMUS is a must see for all animators. As far as i know there is no rotoscope in this film (im sure you will agree with me on this one)
Usually this is where i would end, perhaps with a few photos from the party afterwards, but this time there is something more. The strange thing with this opening night was the fact that there was no trailer…Through the funny and hardly understandable translations of German into English i managed to find out that they indeed had a trailer but this will not be shown because it promotes violence…I have to say that i have seen the trailer and this is a bunch of bullocks… I have not been able to find the link to the trailer but here are two stills from it- Basically its a bunch of kids shooting paint guns in vibrant live colors all over Stuttgart. I found the trailer to be fun, innocent and well made, and can only give a big thumbs down for this move of the festival organization…
Paulina Majda on “Peter and the wolf”
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009I had the pleasure to meet up with Paulina Majda recently on the Lille film festival.
If you dont know this talented lady was the art director on the Oscar winning short “Peter and the wolf” and was in Lille to present the works of Se-ma-for film production studio. She was kind enough to write up something about the Peter and the wolf production, as well as give us some rather cool photos form the set. Thank you very much Paulina!
Here is what she wrote:
Paulina:
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I was wondering about some anecdotes from Peter and the Wolf, that you asked,
Honestly it hard to choose something funny and interesting after few years, already.
I remember the people.
Hugh Gordon was a leading cinematographer, about 70 ( on the photos he is with white beard) , but he never want to tell me exactly his age. Every day he rode a bike to the film set from his home. He put cycle helmet on his head, for hands and knees, jump on the bike and ride through the city. Is not often in Poland, in a quite big city, during the winter also. When he reached to the film set he jump out from the bike, and jump on the film set and work till the night. Amazing. Great, warm man with great condition. I miss him till now.
It is quite funny when you see the people about the 60, 70 and they are so much involved in the puppet production, they are so serious about everything what they do with the puppets. I am not laughing of course, but this is cute, that even old man can play puppets, and they are important for him.
It was a real boy, who inspired Suzie for the Peter. She met him, as I good remember, in Russia.
And she got a picture of him. During preparing the sculpture he was changed a little, but not so much.
For made a forest, we use a real trees from the forest’ s school (place where trees are growing up), actually we bought all the trees from the school and we changed them a little, make smaller, not so bushy, and so on… (some you can see on the photos from the top)
The balloons. Director want to be a real balloons, animated traditional, not computer, so the tests of balloon were looks like: balloon from the glass, plastic balloon, condom balloon, small real balloon, but always goes wrong with animation so, in the end, we decided to make it in computer and this is the best idea ,I think.
As a curiosity, on the premier in Royal Albert Hall in London, there wasn’t any balloon in some scenes,
I can’t remember if some one seen it, maybe I shouldn’t tell it?
Sometimes after parties some of the people slept in the film forest. It was enough big to hide in there for real people. It was funny.
Some international romances during the production and some children; friendships of course
And huge sadness after the end. It was hard to say good bye.)
I send you some photos with puppets, how the puppets were made, for example the chair of the Peter,
and wolf surgery, animators in their thoughts, under the tree, in Peter’s house, a bottle of Russian vodka from 50-60 ties, and the Russian cucumbers. The woman with the long hair it is Suzie , the director ,and I work with her with a big, real pleasure.
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Thank you again Paulina, and here are the photos
all images are copyright “Se-ma-for” and “Break ThruFilms Studio”. please respect this
