Sunday, November 28, 2010

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation


The EuroPrix 2010 winner animation is A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation which has two directors Stefan Leuchtenberg and Martin Wallner.
Fortunately, I had the chance to meet Stefan during our stay in Graz. Stefan is a welcoming person so the interview went quite smoothly, considering I am an amateur interviewer. The interview was conducted on 12th of November, just one day before the project won the prize of the best animation.

A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation is an animated short film about 15 minutes long. Stefan puts the story in a nutshell: it is about a young man whose father dies because of a pancreatic cancer and the boy has to cope with the loss. The film begins with the funeral and shows how feelings change throughout the years.

“We tried to show the feelings through visual and metaphorical ways”, Stefan explains.

Stefan revealed that most of the animators who worked in this project did not have professional work experience which brought up this question: how is the level of the quality reached in their animation?

Stefan answered that they asked many students for help. Some of the students had a little experience and some of them had almost no professional experience at all.
The 3D artists mainly did not have much experience. However, the key is that they had a technical guy in their team who had done some projects before and he was very important in a technical way. All the audio recordings were done by professionals in studios like Wavefront Studios, BASIS Berline, Audio Machinery and ZigZag Production in London.
The musical instruments like violin and cello were used and those recordings were done by professionals as well.

He continues: “There was a problem because we had a very small budget so we could not pay the students. We just had to hope that the quality of the designs would be the way we wanted it to be.” Very often they waited for months because the animators (the students) had tasks to do for their university and they told the directors: “We can not go on”, “I am so sorry, I wanted to do it but I can not”, “I have to work for money”, or something like that. So definitely that was the reason that made the movie longer time to develop and sometimes Stefan and Martin had to work on it all by themselves.

Stefan says that the story is Martin’s idea and that it was influenced by his own experience. “Martin always says it is not an autobiography but very similar to his own experience”, Stefan tells.

“We did not expect the technical barrier to be that high. When we started the project, we wanted to have our theses done. Normally it takes half a year to finish a thesis and we thought that now as we are two persons, we can finish the animation in two semesters”, Stefan clarifies the initial phases of the project.

The animation quadrupled the time needed for a standard thesis and then the two graduates ended up studying three semesters for the master level course. Afterwards the team had to work one and a half year just to realize the project.

“If I had known how long the project would take I am not sure whether I would have started it at all. Now I am so happy that we did it, especially when I was preparing the presentation for the EuroPrix last week and saw the animatics from the initial phases. I was so glad that we finished it and that I am not at that point anymore”, Stefan describes his feelings.

He gives a useful advice for anyone starting a big project: “If you want to do something like that, first you need to believe in it and then you just have to sit down and do it”.


A Lost and Found Box of Human Sensation - Trailer
Facebook Page
http://www.lostbox.de/

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