ANIMEST - The International Animation Film Festival

It’s a real adventure to do an animation film. Usually, for a feature it can take up to 3- 4 years, would you believe? There is a lot of work , patience and ambition involved when working to produce an animation film.

The art of producing animations is definitely a specific, distinct  cinematographic universe.

There are not too many schools/universities  to prepare directors in this specific field, just few in the entire world. For many people, animation procedures remain still a mystery.

As far as I understood, there are three types of doing animation:
1.  Using Drawings (the best are the Japanese animations as The wind rises or Blood -C: The last dark
these movies have a perfection in drawing, imitating so well the real nature of the things, amazing work!)
2. Using poppets (the best I could ever see it's Strings (directed by Anders Rønnow Klarlund )

3. Using 3-D technologies
4. There are some more ways to do animation,   as this genre  is a cinematographic experience and when producing a film, your imagination can fly as far as  possible.

 

 

But when do we use animation in cinematography?

Well, as far as I understood, animation provides you with a huge amount of possibilities when showing something specific in a footage.

You can show the love between a 15 years old boy and a teacher of 28^th  years old, for example ( Garden of words), you can show some human feelings, policies  or behaviour (like in the Lisa Limone&Maroc Orange story), you can overcome any ethical policy or society rules boundaries as in animation you can do everything you want. There is another untold rule as well : to show in animations what you can not show in reality or what you can not show in a movie, using actors.   Sometimes  this genre is used even in documentaries  ( as ‘Crulic’) or scientific films ( as ‘Animatedconversation with Noam Chomsky’).  Usually, in animation  stylization  is very important when we talk about representing human beings, animals, places and things. ‘The boy and the World’ shows perfectly how a life story is shown stylizing almost everything: human beings, nature, animals, etc.

When the animation is too abstract, it’s even hard to understand the message. When I asked the animation filmmakers about this, they told me that an animated film it’s an experience to live, like Picasso’s paintings.

With  Jegannath Ramanujam  an animation filmmaker who studied a master in animation in Singapore. He was so kind to explain me some 'animation secrets' and steps in doing such a  movie.

 

 It's so important to find the right person to explain you the right thing. Otherwise I might misunderstand all this beautiful, exhausting, hard working genre.

 

I had the opportunity to come across the animation movies through the Animest  International Animation Film Festival, organized annually in Romania, Bucharest, between 3-12 October.  For me, it was a great experience and I am glad that I had the chance to better understand this cinematographic kind. I was encouraged to make an animation film as well. The animation  filmmakers who participated at the festival told me that it’s easy to jump from documentaries to animation,  but I am not so sure.  Actually, I find it  difficult to produce an animation film, either short film, advertisement, video clip  or feature. Imagine that they film frame to frame – for a movie there are thousands of thousands of frames to be  linked afterwards! Furthermore, if the animation is made through drawings, you have to draw thousands of pages and have the perfect image of geometric things, the motion representation, the drawing abilities. You have to be an artist, a  geometry -mathematician (to imagine the forms in space and the movements of things), a  good story teller as well.

Coming back to the motion, we have to bear in mind that the real human being is moving (running or stepping) differently than the animation human being. The same is happening with the animal's motion or the motion of the things.  So, when you want to make a ball jump, for example, you have to know how to draw it  in order to make the all liked drawings to simulate the jumping.  Space orientation, geometry, anatomy, biology, you have to know a bit of everything. Difficult, huh?

 

Maybe you would think that animations are for kids only. Actually it’s opposite. Most of them are produced for mature people and only some are designed for kids. Would you believe that ?

J

 

 And of course, the dark  side imagination is represented by the Creepy Animation Night. Well, if there are so many creepy people in the World, why not to manifest their weirdness behaviour through art, as the animation movies ?  Actually there were good animations, I must admit it.

kiss and hug