Nocturna

In the beginning of the year my professor showed 2 minutes of a film called Nocturna in class. I fell in love with it immediately after seeing it and decided to get my own copy. Unfortunately, there are no distributors for this great animation in North America. So I have to search else where than just Amazon.com.

The story is about this little boy on the cover, Tim, who is very afraid of the dark.  One night when he is going to sleep he discovers that his star has disappeared from the sky. The story isn't as excited as I had expected but the world they create is really amazing. The lights in the film is absolutely beautiful. My favorite characters in the movie are those street light (on the cover - standing on top of Cat Sheperd head)

The original soundtrack is in Spanish but I can only find the English version
I also love the music in the film. They are composed by Nicolas Errèra. I need to make more musician friends!

Chicago International Film Festival: 38-39˚c

Last Friday I went to see the 48th Chicago International Film Festival, Screening animation shorts - Blurring the Lines. I like most of them but I'm going to talk about one particular one called 38-39˚c made by Kangmin Kim. I was doing some research on the making of this film and found his other projects. I watched a couple of his timelapes videos (how the film was made) and I'm thinking...I kind of want to go to CalArts to learn what they have there in the experimental animation department. I'm seriously thinking about taking my MFA there.

The film is on his Vimeo now

Side notes: It was raining on Friday night and during the middle of the screening, the theater ceiling started to pour water in above the back row seats. It happen during the end of Oh Willy (another good shorts). The water made funny sounds.  At first I thought the sound was part of the film, but it was coming from behind. So I thought, "Oh, they got really nice stereo," then I saw people getting out of the back row seats and I figured.

Paper CutOut Animation: The Door

This a beautiful paper cut out animation made by a group of students from National Taiwan University of Arts. Everything is cut out, including the figure silhouette. There's is a video of their Making of The Door, which looks amazing and laboring.
I'm working toward a final project for my Sound to Image class and this short is going to be my reference point. I do mostly hand drawn character animation so it will be fun for me to try out something different, like stop motion paper animation with a non-narrative approach. Ohh I'm excited for my final project! First I need to make a storyboard and then I need to record the audio then I have to exacto knife the paper structures and finally start spending hours and hours animating the movements.

Dialog SB

This is a thumbnail of my redo for last week's post. I said that it's really boring to do talking heads style SB so this time I try to use background elements and characters' movements to make te shot more interesting. I was watching Death Becomes Her before I draw this and I was amazed by the camera placements and movements in the move.

The first 5 panels was a single panning shot.

Dialog Storyboard

I did a storyboard last week and I realized it's a terrible storyboard. The worst thing you can do as a storyboard artist is to draw talking heads and that's basically what I did. I'm going redraw the whole dialog scene. I made the mistake but I'm learning.

Bad storyboard example

Fable Storyboard: The Wolf and the Crane

Another storyboard assignment base on fables and this on is The Wolf and the Crane.
update: thumbnails of the Storyboard