Anima Campus!

We are delighted that Blue Cat was among those chosen to take part in the workshops and lectures of Anima Campus Tallinn, an international event for animation professionals. It was also a pleasure to meet colleagues working in small animation companies and to exchange thoughts with them about what was going on. After all, this was the first time animators from different fields had come together – artists creating classical animation at the drawing table, computer animators tweaking all kinds of program parameters on the television, TV advertising and web fronts, and of course people from film studios. At times it seems that commercial animation, as a relatively young branch of our creative industries, is going through the same stages of development that the web went through a few years ago. In that sense, Nick Dorra’s talk on Rovio’s Angry Birds was certainly inspiring for animators working in cross-media.

Still, the most interesting part turned out to be the talks and workshops on stop-motion. Handmade films have a value of their own and no longer bear much resemblance to the ones we may have hated as children. The puppet film-makers showed the crazy patience with which they make their wonderful animations. Getting a single frame sometimes takes a great deal of effort: everything has to be stable and nothing may shift out of place uncontrollably during the shoot. There are 25 frames in one second, and so the time goes…

Mark Shapiro presented the stop-motion technique of Coraline through many examples.

In this puppet film, which looks like computer animation, the different facial expressions were made with faces modelled in a 3D program on a computer, printed with a 3D printer and then attached to the puppet’s face during animation. Although it looks “like the real thing” and is technologically clever, these characters’ facial expressions still have the artificial aesthetic typical of computer animation, familiar from PIXAR films, which cannot compete with truly real things such as the sets and the clothes worn by the same characters.

A real XXXXXXS jumper – though in fact the people at Nukufilm in Estonia can also make clothes on the same scale :)

While at Nukufilm film-making comes across as a way of life, our visit to Joonisfilm made us wonder, despite ourselves, why the studio people who create a film like “Lotte” don’t deserve better equipment, bigger monitors and more ergonomic office chairs. The contrast with advertising agencies, where staff have much better working conditions while creating only temporary value, was striking. All the more so because the number of different products already bearing the Lotte brand is awe-inspiring and, if only with the soon-to-be-finished 4D film in mind, is not limited to shampoo bottles.

Of the new animated films that had their premieres, we liked Ülo Pikkov’s “Keha mälu” (Body Memory) and Rao Heidmets’ “Prohveti sünd…?” (The Birth of a Prophet…?)

In the case of “Keha mälu”, a year earlier, at an Animateek event, we had seen the filmmaker talk about his film, which was then still in production. In the dark cinema, the filmmaker’s own account formed a whole with the animation. It felt as if part of the filmmaker’s personal commentary went into the film, i.e. became part of it. Without the commentary, the film probably means something rather different to the viewer, and more facets are left open to interpretation, which is a bit of a pity. But the experimental quality, and at the same time the documentary quality, along with the cutting and freezing of the timeline, came across as somehow powerful thanks to the filmmaker’s commentary. It simply cut all the more painfully.

The catalogue sums up the content of “Prohveti sünd…?” as follows: “A person is a slave to their own imagination. There is a way out of it, along a long and complicated road that requires a good memory.” But there is something much more important in the film too. Not least those moments of recognition of our present, a strange present not yet put into words. Crawling out of one’s own skin and other metaphors felt fresh and surprising. Because of the layers of meaning, you hardly need to pay attention to the visuals… although they too were pretty cool in their own way… Puppets from the film "Prohveti sünd...?" Photo: Rao Heidmets Puppets from the film "Prohveti sünd...?" Photo: Rao Heidmets

Puppets from the film "Prohveti sünd...?" Photo: Rao Heidmets

Puppets from the film "Prohveti sünd...?" Photo: Rao Heidmets

Many thanks to Heilika Pikkov’s team for managing to organise such a necessary and well-run event!