Shooting of "Sebastian the fidler"

Here there are some photos that we took along the the four weeks that we spent on shooting the shortfilm.

Preproduction of "Sebastian the fiddler" 02

More pics of the preproduction of "Sebastian the Fiddler". The creators of the shortfilm were Pere Devis, Lucas Bañón, René Bolea, Ismael Canales, José Pérez and myself

Preproduction of "Sebastian the fiddler", our bachelor film

"Sebastian the fiddler" was our bachelor film in the university. We were a team of seven animation students, and we spent 6 months to make it. I remember that we tried to do it as more professional as possible:, and we did a lot of preproduction: designs, differents armatures, reference sets. We learned how to build a good stopmotion armature and we did it! also we made some very realistic sets, with a gothic style and we could use a cool equipment of light and photo.

We had 3 important problems. First one, is that we had 6 months to do the shortfilm, and we spent 5 on the preproduction, so there was only one month to shoot seven minutes of stopmotion animation... that is crazy. The second problem was that the shortfilm needed the voice in off of the storyteller, and we never found the money to do that, so the shortfilm is finished without the voice. The third was that after we finish amazing sets, characters, we found a composer for the music, and we had a great place in the university to shoot the short with a full lighting equipment, we couldn´t use any stopmotion software (rules of the university), and we animated without the reference of the previous frame...in the "czech way", as we said then.
Finally, we could finish the shortfilm, but we had the feeling that the shortfilm would be much better if we would be able to accomplish our initial ideas... the off voice and the software issues mainly.

First animation exercises

I have uploaded some of the first animation exercises that i did on the school. These exercises were very useful in order to learn how to apply the animation principles. They are the typical walk cycle, lipsync, etc..very amateur as well!

Pics of my first stop-motion animations

I want to post some pics of our first animations as students in Fine Arts and in the animation school. The animations and the characters used to be very simple, and also we didn´t have a good animation software, so we couldn´t see the frame before the pose in which one we were working. But anyway, we enjoyed a lot making the sets and the puppets and trying to animate in the czech way :). I only have these pics, because the animations are in VHS...

Early works 02

More early drawings that I did for a personal project in the university. It was a comic with a very dark atmosphere, inspired in Lovecraft tales and cosmic horror literature. The name was " The Dreamers"...when I take a look now to them, I think that maybe I was so negative in that time of my life : )

Early works 01

I think is better if I start my blog with my early works.

These are some drawings of my time as student in Fine Arts, for an own project about the Lord of the Rings. All of them were drawing with traditional artistic tools; pencils, brushes, watercolours...because at that time there was no photoshop. The illustrations are very amateur, but I like to see them now and remember those times, when my partners and me were drawing all the evenings in the university´s coffeeshop... were good times!