Technique: 3D animation

A train compartment, four people, a ticket collector, a Barcelos penknife and a potential assassin. Will they all make it to the end of the journey? In this technique, puppets are animated “image by image” and the animator uses both his hands. This is fundamental, another fundamental fact is that the more the scale of the puppet equals the scale of the hands, the better the animator’s job will be. With this statement we would like to stress that if the puppet is too small, the animator’s fingers will find it difficult to animate small details, such as the eyelids. However, a very big puppet can also create problems since the animator’s hands cannot animate the puppet as a “whole”. In this case, the animator must first animate an arm, then another, and so on. The immediate result is that the process takes longer and is probably less perfect. With “A Suspeita” the puppets are sitting down 95% of the time and their movements are mostly from the waist up. We decided to build the puppets with a larger scale than usual, that is, larger than the scale of the hand when the puppet is standing up.

Technique: 3D animation

Lupe likes bruno. Brune does not like Lupe. A fscinating passion story, of impossible love, of... Ok, maybe it's only Lupe and Bruno story. « La lupe i en Bruno” is a short animated film made frame by frame with dolls. The dolls were made out of moulded wood with an internal structure built of articulated metal and dressed with clothes that were especially made to fit. The sets are made of wood. During the shooting, we used stage lights reduced in size, capturing each frame with a digital reflex camera with different objectives (thus achieving a quality of image very similar to that of a film camera). The frames were stored in a hard disk and digitally treated afterwards (removal of impurities, digital effects, etc.). After post-production, the master copy was made from the high resolution original images.
Marc Riba and Anna Solanas

Animation technique: Digital 3D animation

“Story of a Caramel” is a short film animation entirely designed in 3D technology, produced at Animago's studios between 2004 and 2006 and completed in 2007. It is an adaptation of an original story written by Rita Serra, entitled "The Caramel." An imaginative story about the life of a particular caramel, which suffers the difficulties of life, as passing the days in a petrol pump abandoned in the middle of Alentejo in the 60's, until the day when its date of validity expires ...

"Story of a Caramel" is a digital animation short film totally made with 3D technology. The film uses the latest animation, rendering and modelling techniques to create sets, landscapes and characters for animated sequences in high resolution images for cinema. From the drawings to the storyboard, that used traditional techniques, to the landscapes from Alentejo, to the placing of virtual skeletons to animate the characters, to the virtual cameras for the filming, all this technological paraphernalia meant a daily rendering distributed between a dozen connected computers for about two years.

Technique:drawing on paper, 2D computer

Jaime Ícaro works on a weekly TV magazine. At the end of another dull working day he receives a fax from Teresa, his girlfriend, breaking up from their one year relation Jaime leaves the office reading the fax, and only a few minutes latter he realises that Lisbon is not having a normal rush hour…

"Dinner in Lisbon is my first animation film and is probably the last one I’ll make using more traditional techniques. During the different stages of production, the film became a real hands-on course on what can, should and should not be done in animation. The original script was based on a story by JP Simões that had previously been adapted for a comic book. The film’s sets and characters were drawn by hand and devised in a way as to preserve the spirit and graphic layout of the original comic book."

André Carrilho

Nuno Beato, Portugal, Betacam digital, 2007, 38”
Animation technique: Plasticine animation

A didactic film for the children's TV series titled “Ilha das Cores”. In this film we wanted the children to identify the characters with their own habitat whilw learning in a simple yet entertainment manner.

"In this case the process was more manual. We constructed several chicks in Plasticine with the beaks made out of modelling clay. Plasticine is great for modelling during animation but if we already have several options for substitution, the process becomes quicker: the walking of the chicks was all done with substitution. The shooting was made with a digital photo camera assisted by video connected to a 3D animation software, where, with the help of Onionskin, a single animator could animate the characters and draw the sets."

Nuno Beato

Animation technique: Plasticine animation

A didactic film for the children's TV series titled “Ilha das Cores”.

"The Button uses animation of objects techniques , one of the simplest forms of stop-motion animation, that however requires more effort when it comes to solving problems such as keeping a needle in the air and making a jacket move frame by frame. These were some of the problems that arose during production. We put some aluminium wire inside the shoelaces and jacket and with the help of a microphone stand all objects could fly, the rest was a matter of imagination.

Nuno Beato

Technique: 3D animation with plasticine

A didactic film for the children's TV series titled “Ilha das Cores”.

What fascinates me the most in animation is experimentation and that’s what interests me when I develop my films. In “The Sardine” there’s a mixture of techniques: all the characters were made with modelling clay and painted with acrylic paint with the exception of the main character that was made with Plasticine. “The Sardine” was animated frame by frame on a blue background. Later we used a previously photographed Croma Keying set. The secondary characters were also photographed and digitally animated and all the elements were combined in post-production.

Techinique: Drawing, Paper cut-outs, Collage Video for “Sexto Andar” by Clã
A sweet song becomes a cloud coming out of the radio and travels across the universe where the characters are having a nervous breakdown then slides into a small bedroom in the sixth floor of a building… This video uses different animation techniques. The characters are drawn with ink and charcoal. The sets mix collage, photographs, drawings and different materials. The cloud and the bird were made out of paper cut-outs and animated over different layers of under-lit glass and photographed frame by frame.

Autour de Minuit is a producer created in 2001 in Paris by Nicolas Schmerkin, and it has received in the Festival of Clermont-Ferrand 2006 the prize for best French producer of the year. The production work consists on supporting innovative projects from the aesthetic point of view and develops original graphics universes with solid content, and has been asserting itself in the area of 3D video, including the videoclip and advertising, but also in a more experimental aspect. A selection of works born in Autour de Minuit will be displayed on two screens in the exhibition at Solar:
X.PRESSION
Laurie Thinot, France, 2007, 3'20”

CHRYSALIDE (IKI)
Yann Bertrand Damien Serban, France, 2005, 7'30”

EMPIRE
Édouard Salier, France, 2005, 4'

LEVIATHAN
Simon Marcondes, Brazil, 2006, 4'30”

RAYMOND
Bif, UK/France, 2007, 5'

COLLISION
Max Hattler, UK, 2005, 2'30”

UA93: FROM NEWARK TO NOWHERE
JJ Walker, USA, 2005, 2'25”

MEISCHEID
Matray, France, 2007, 2'20”

ÇA NE RIME À RIEN
Claude Duty, France, 2007, 2'05"

THE DEF SONG
Doctor L / Xavier Reyé, France, 2004, 4’20“

OMR: THE WAY WE HAVE CHOSEN
mAt&spoN, France, 2004, 4'20”

ELECTRONIC PERFORMERS
A. Ganzerli, L. Bourdoiseau, J. Blanquet, France, 2003, 5'30”

TELEFERIC VOODOO
Paoul Jadoul, Belgium, 2006, 4'

WARNING PETROLEUM PIPELINE
Jan van Nuenen, Netherlands, 2004, 4'45”