Hi 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
Just finished listening to a presentation of a french movie called “the prodigies”- the speaker confirmed my hunch and when asked about the BOlt Film and how they had the same paintery render the speaker said that they did make a descision to tone down the stylization od the render in Bolt-He got this info from a guy who worked on Bolt- pitty..