Since the start of October, the Animation Bachelor atelier has been boiling with life! Next to the already installed 3rd years working hard on the development of their bachelor films, we, the student of the second year have settled in our cubicles. Eager to finally have our own desks, we’ve been painting and decorating the space all over!

But through the fuzzy plush worms hanging from the ceiling, the fairy lights, motivational posters picturing our beloved head of study: Jürgen Hass and other nap corners, there isn’t only laughter and late-night werewolf games in the atelier. Now that the class is split into teams from 2 to 6 students, we have been spending the past few weeks working hard to build our applied projects for the semester; 25 second (to a minute) idents for the corporation clients: Adult Swim, Amnesty International and KurtzFilmNacht.

During this pre-production period we’ve had multiple inputs on scriptwriting, character, prop and background design as well as storyboarding and sound for our animatics, helping us to develop every aspect of our projects and getting multiple rounds of reviews from various perspectives and expertise. While the 2D groups are refining their character designs and storyboards or exploring textures, the stop-motion based teams are already busy building their puppets and sets, next to the only 3D project, which is deep into modeling their assets and discovering the brand-new brushstroke tool add on from Blender.

Although supervised by our semester’s coordinator Jochen Ehmann, we are mostly self-organized and the different needed roles throughout the production pipeline such as storyboard artist, puppet builder, rigger or sound designer are designated through discussion within our work groups. This allows each student to develop their individual skills in their specialization, but also for some to discover new roles within production that might interest them in the future and that they would not have considered otherwise. It has been greatly satisfying to finally put the theory and basics learned during our first year of the bachelor to practice. As well as learning more interpersonal and organizational skills, such as communication within a team, making sure that everyone’s needs and voices are heard (including oneself!), managing time and unexpected obstacles and finding time to have fun and laugh as a class.

Soon enough, our animatics were ready to be sent to the clients for approval! (Not after a last-minute change of format of course!) PowerPoints ready on our hard disks, we gathered on the 5th of November, to present our work so far to our peers, teachers and clients, of which Wolf Gehart the Adult Swim envoy was present via Zoom. The teams working for a different client got their review per e-mail. The aim of those presentations isn’t really to show our process yet but more to do a sort of checkpoint of what has been accomplished during this phase of pre-production.

Picture 1: The team Phonomenal Battle presenting their 3D blocking and concept art in from of the class

Picture 2: The team of Blossom Blade listening to the reviews of Wolf Gehart

Picture 3: The team Forever Together presenting the concept art of a church in front of the class

Pressure is building up, only 5 minutes scheduled to present and 15 minutes of feedback. Does the rhythm of the animatic work? Will the joke land? Will the clients understand our vision, or did we completely miss the mark? Does an element not fit into the guidelines? Did we remember to add a black frame at the beginning of our animatic as fervently asked by our headmaster?? Many questions running through our heads before it’s our team’s time to present. Deep breath. Here we go!

The few technical problems put aside; the presentations went quite smoothly. It is always stressful to present the work in which not only you, but your colleges and friends have been putting their hearts and souls into for the past weeks. Yet every team’s review was delivered in a caring and insightful matter. Without of course a few laughter in reaction to the not-so-quite-on-point suggestions and concerns worded by the “London Colleges” now famous within the student body. All in good faith of course! As we, for the most part, are discovering the joys and frustrations of commissioned productions and client relations. (Of which our coordinator Jochen Ehmann still takes on most of the toils for us.)

This round of review was our chance to get a fresh eye on our projects, to take in the first reactions from our peers and advice from our teachers who have accompanied us so far, to clear up any miscommunication or inconsistencies as well as simply showcasing our progress so far! How greatly rewarding it was to see our idents and the ones of our friends and colleges slowly come to life and become more and more tangible! Working on such a big project for the first time is stressful for any student, but those presentations, allowed us to see that our efforts are really paying off and that we not only have the support of our teammates but all 2nd year students behind us. The positivity, encouragements and the gentle criticisms from the other students truly showed us that this ident is also a class effort to give each other the strength to power through and inspire one another!

Students of the MA Animation

At the beginning of this semester, Regina Pessoa, one of the most talented and famous animators nowadays, visited us at the Hochschule Luzern Design Film Kunst to give a workshop to the MA Animation students, where I had the opportunity to attend and meet her. We talked about her first steps in animation filmmaking, style, her creative process, inspiration, challenges, and advice for aspiring animation artists.

Regina P.

Regina Pessoa is a Portuguese independent animation filmmaker known for the short films The Night (1999), Tragic Story with Happy Ending (2005), Kali, The Little Vampire (2012), and Uncle Thomas: Accounting for the Days (2019), that were multi-awarded at different festivals, among them the Jury Prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2019. Her work shows darkness and light, strength, and expression through high contrast and texture that invite you to press stop on her films and appreciate the visual richness of each frame as a painting.

Still from “Uncle Tomas”, 2019

Hello Regina. I’m very lucky because 15 years ago, when I studied graphic design in Colombia, you were a great inspiration for me, and today I am sitting with you. Thank you for coming to HSLU.

Tell us how you first became interested in making films

Well, I grew up without any access to moving images, without television. So it’s like I grew up in the 19th century and never interested in animation. I studied art and painting at an art school in Portugal. Art was very expensive studies, so I was looking for a part-time job, and I found a small animation studio in Porto, the city where I was studying and living. I went there, and they were starting an independent animated short, which I have no idea what it was. I was very surprised and fascinated that this kind of content existed, the animated shorts, where each author would develop their own artistic identity and mix it with all the beloved artistic disciplines, such as music, sound, writing, literature, and the arts, so I got the opportunity to start my own movies, and since then, I never left the studio.

Short film: Tragic Story with Happy Ending, 2005 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnDrQDrTuFY

How do you define your style, your visual style? 

Well, how I define my visual style, I think, is… Well, I define it as light coming from the darkness. I am lucky because, in general, some people cherish my work, but there are people for whom it’s too dark for them. But I don’t think it’s dark at all because what fascinated me is exactly the opposite. It’s to have a dark; it looks like darkness, but then even a little light is wonderful. I like to explore that, this positive feeling of light coming out of the darkness. For me, it’s very inspiring and gives me hope.

What does your creative process look like?

Well, for me, when I’m working on my movies or on a new story, I need a permanent dialogue between writing and drawing. Sometimes, I start with a sentence, followed by an image, then another sentence, and so on. I normally work on the storyboard to figure out the visual narrative in a very intuitive way. Once a friend, a live-action director, told me you should write the script first. And I said, Oh, I should learn from live action, then I tried to write the script, and it was so dry. It was so hard, you know, and it didn’t work for me. I need this dialogue, this permanent dialogue between drawing scenes and writing. For me, it is very important what the idea is and why I want to do this. This is fundamental to find. When I found this, I could endure all the process and the motivation from deep inside me. 

Where do you get your inspiration from?

Well, mostly for the stories and even for the visuals, I get inspiration from my childhood and my experiences. I had no knowledge of film writing. So the solution I found was to talk about my little experiences. And the way I started my first film was my fear of darkness when I was small. I also find inspiration in different artistic forms, such as literature, music, and a lot in painting. I enjoy going to a museum and looking at portrait paintings of medieval and Renaissance art; it is inspiring.

02_Video: Regina posting illustrations

Could you tell us what challenges you faced while making a film?

Maybe it’s a flaw from my background in visual arts, but it’s hard for me to forget or to get rid of the frozen image. I mean, every image for me counts and takes a lot of time, which I have been assuming for myself in working night and day. I don’t know; for 15 years I worked like 16 hours a day, and now I cannot do that anymore.

What would be the best piece of advice for inspiring animation artists?

Well, I always think it is the one that I received from Abi, who became my husband and my producer. He told me. Regina, think about something that is important to you. If that is the case, you will be involved with the images you produce. So, people who will see those images will feel that strength and that commitment. For me, it was the best advice I have received, and I think it is the best I can give. 

Thank you so much, Regina.

It was nice to talk to you. All the best. 

by Pedro Nel Cabrera Vanegas, graduate of MA Animation

Regina and Pedro

What does Regina do in her free time?

Listen here:

Students in the workshop  Screening of the results 

Regina looking at the students’ work            

(Get it? Like the movie? ‘cause we’re a film school, and that’s how we joke haha)
The second years get ready for their biggest challenge yet – applied animation!

The second year has kicked off with a bang!  Right off the gate, we started with an animation warm-up to get us back on our feet after spending a whole summer recovering from our packed first year. 

Usually, we don’t move that fast / just a small glimpse into our dark reality, a full stare into our twisted perspective would make most simply go insane

Afterwards, we were introduced to our main module this year: Applied Animation. 

We were going to apply (hence the title) all we learned last year into one commissioned ident of around 20-ish seconds. But who is commissioning? This year, we’ve got quite some variety: Adult Swim, Amnesty International,  the Kurzfilmnacht Winterthur Festival, UNICEF, and Médecins Sans Frontières.

But before we delve any deeper into the clients there was one more thing we had to do before any of that – the Kükenfest! While we were getting ready to continue our studies there were students who were just getting ready to start theirs and it was our job to welcome them.

One of the main functions of the Kükenfest is not only to break the ice but also to assign the first years a buddy who they’ll be able to ask questions to whenever they feel lost throughout their studies. Since “Küken” means “chick” in English we decided to draw baby chicks and mama birds for them. The first years would pick out a baby they liked and then they’d have to search for us mamas among the crowd.

Here are some of the funny birds we drew! which one would YOU have chosen?

Once we found each other and the initial wave of fear and embarrassment washed away we all sang, danced, and ate all night long. Well, maybe not ate. The delicious food we cooked up got snatched away instantly.

I slaved away in the kitchen making my world-famous Empanadas

The day after we were a little groggy, still shaken up from the party… so what better way to wake right up than a presentation by Adult Swim themselves? For us animation people they were the main event. They’ve produced many shows we know and love (heck, some of us even went to their panel in Annecy) and continue to be one of the few channels that takes risks and greenlights adult animation. 

This also reflects in what they were looking for from us as well as the lovely Gerhard Wolf explained to us that we had full creative freedom to do whatever we wanted. Heck, we could even use some of their IPs!

With a theme in our heads and a pencil in our hands we were handed paper to do thumbnails in and this was like a splash of cold water. Suddenly, we had to be funny on the spot. Come up with something cool (or “cook” as the kids put it nowadays). The pressure was on, the clock was ticking and most of us couldn’t even think straight from the party! Of course, we are students from famous school HSLU, no matter how hangover or tired we were we still delivered. 

Since Adult Swim gets the most pitches we didn’t really have time to pitch our ideas, the storyboards had to speak for themselves. Some people saved their cards for later, we were going to have the chance to pitch to our peers later, so why not keep the stew burning?

After lunch, Amnesty International presented themselves. You’ve probably heard of them and know about their cause: advocating for human rights. But not everyone does, and their ident wanted us to raise awareness to them and their cause. Because of this some very unique challenges presented themselves to us. Unlike Adult Swim, who is open to pretty much anything, Amnesty wanted something more specific, and they came to us with a vision of what they wanted. It was overwhelming to tackle a topic as important as human rights, especially after coming off of the funny hahas of Adult Swim, but it was an interesting one for sure.

Our class busy at work

A good night’s sleep and a cup of coffee in the morning later and we were back at it again, this time with Lynn Gerlach from Kurzfilmnacht Winterthur – a film festival focused on short films. Since Lynn is a former animator she obviously has immense respect for the craft. In fact, she even said she always tries to sneak more animation into the program, hehe. The task for this client was to create a trailer that would play in movie theatres across the country. There were no restrictions, the only “rules” we had to follow were that our trailer had to have a cat somewhere and the cat had to meow. Other than that we were free. The catch? They only take one trailer per year. 1 in 33 chances! And with classmates as talented as ours it was going to be a tough competition.

Our teacher Jochen took the time to snap some pictures and take notes, thank you!

Cats are the greatest creatures ever and their dominion over dogs is obvious to most, so it is no surprise that the pitches for this festival were phenomenal. 

One trip to the cafeteria later and we were greeted by the next organization: UNICEF. You’ve probably seen ads for their campaigns all around you (in fact, after they gave us a rundown of what campaigns they are currently running I started noticing them a whole lot more). They work to protect the rights of children, making sure they are protected, supported, and taken seriously. Again, this was another heavy topic to tackle, but with Amnesty behind us, we were more prepared to tackle this client.

One of our exchange students talking with the UNICEF representatives

Last but not least, Médecins Sans Frontières (or Doctors Without Borders)came to present themselves. Like Amnesty and UNICEF, they are a humanitarian aid organization. When they asked us what we think they do someone answered they “doctored without bordering” which is essentially right, they deploy doctors to conflict areas and treat the wounds of injured civilians and soldiers alike.

A woman from the organization who had been deployed in Sudan told us about her experiences, and shared personal stories with us, motivating us to tell stories that resonated deeply with people. They wanted people to know what MSF was about not by explaining who they were but by showing it via impactful storytelling. This was an exciting task and by now we were comfortable with casting aside our fears and putting ourselves out there with these sensitive topics. 

The lovely Jessica Minarro from MSF tells us about her experiences

But now what? We workshopped some stories, drew some thumbnails, and presented our ideas but what comes next? Well, now we keep working on them. Polish them, draw concept art, and get people excited as we come onto the next phase – voting.

That’s right, soon we’ll be presenting our favorite ideas and showing them to both our classmates as well as the clients. This is a scary, nerve-wracking but most importantly exciting time. 

Next time you hear from us, we’ll be working on the projects already! Stay tuned, because we are only getting started.

For the second time, Animation Lucerne and HSLU had the chance to send an MA student and a BA graduate to a small island in Norway on a creative journey at the Arctic Hideaway.

The small island of Sørvær, home to The Arctic Hideaway in the Fleinvær archipelago, is a place where nature reveals your true essence. Located near Bodø, beyond the Arctic Circle, this remote island is a sanctuary for artists from all over the world. The container-like wooden cabins became our home for three weeks, offering a rare opportunity to disconnect and focus on our work.

As soon as we arrived and settled into our cabins, we were drawn into the island’s beauty. Its rugged landscapes and ever-changing light sparked creativity. One of us captured the surroundings through 3D scans, videos, and field recordings, while the other immersed in the creation of an animatic for an animation film. The island stripped away distractions, leaving only ourselves and our art. Like the island itself—bare, unique, and visible—we felt deeply connected to our work and nature.

During an excursion, we met Magnus, a lifelong islander who shared how the island’s soundscape had changed. Climate change has reduced the seabirds, leaving many ‘duck houses’ empty. This absence inspired an exploration of the theme of loss, using digital material gathered on the island.

A highlight was our collaboration with a local artist Are in his studio, where we worked on a linocut print, blending digital practices with traditional techniques. This grounded us, connecting modern methods to the island’s artistic traditions.

The time we spent at The Arctic Hideaway was transformative, both personally and creatively. This magical place, where we became one with nature while staying true to ourselves, will continue to inspire our work for years to come. We are grateful for this experience and hope to return to this little paradise someday.

Thanks to Lavinia Petrache, animator from Zurich, and Håvard Lund, musician from Norway, who made this cooperation between The Arctic Hideaway and HSLU possible.

Hi. I’m Sven. I freshly graduated from the Animation BA at HSLU just this summer.

Up until the LuMAA, I’ve been a 2D Animator. I have opened Blender and I’ve set a keyframe before, but I never seriously approached 3D animation, let alone worked with a proper rig.

However, I have always had a fascination with the medium. Why not combine that interest with my love for character animation?

So when LuMAA came up this year, I decided to take the opportunity to finally take a proper stab at 3D. Follow along as I discover the world of CG animation!

And heyo! I’m Emanuel. I am in my second year and have been animating in 3D for some time now, but I want to grow and learn a lot more about 3D character animation. LuMAA is one of the best courses for growing as an animator, so why not take the plunge again?

Block 1A: Human Walk Cycle

Time and time again I’m amazed by how much I can learn from doing default walks!

Erica Palmerini showed us a blocking approach to 3D animation, where you pose the Character from keyframes to breakdowns to in-betweens, quite similar to the classic 2D approach. Because of this, I felt at home quite quickly. I was expecting my 2D experience to help, but I was surprised about just how well my skills translated to CG.

As for getting used to Maya: We had a small introduction prior to the workshop, which helped a lot to find my way around the program. Naturally, it still felt quite clunky in the beginning, but luckily Erica and the students from abroad were very happy to help. By day three Maya posed no more issues. (The Autodesk gods must have been on my side though, because the program crashed a whopping 0 times in my first week! I learned only later how blessed I was…) 

One thing that I soon learned to love about 3D animation is how easily you can experiment without being destructive. It’s crazy how much the attitude of a walk can change just by slightly offsetting or scaling keyframes. And it’s super fast to iterate!

As the week came to an end, we went down to the REX, the small Cinema of the HSLU, to look at our work on the big screen. Discussing our Animations this way was a great way to end the week, so the REX reviews became a weekly thing.

Block 2: Creature Animation

In week 2 we animated a quadruped walk cycle with Lukas Niklaus. Not only did we have double the legs to take care of, but we also approached it quite differently than in week one: This time around, Lukas advised us to work directly with curves, achieving our poses by changing the interpolation between as few keyframes as possible. 

This was more abstract to me since it was a different way of thinking. Rather than coming up with poses, you would think about the speeds and offsets at which limbs move. 

Once I got the hang of it, approaching animation this way helped a lot with understanding how muscles work.

Working with fewer keys made it slightly harder for me to achieve organic movement. However, once I did, it was even easier to iterate than with the Blocking approach. Another bonus of working this way is that once you’re happy with your movement, you don’t have to smoothen it.

In the second week of the Creature animation Block, we tackled an acting shot. Together with Michael Aerni, we studied animals’ behavior in depth. We combined the previously learned techniques to bring our animals alive. For this exercise, I chose a little Bulbul bird. With its snappy movement it was quite the contrast to the tiger I animated the previous week. It’s really interesting to see how much body size influences movement.

Throughout the week, Michael also gave us interesting insights into previs and cameras inside and outside of animation software.

Block 1B: Lip sync 

By week 4 I started feeling quite confident in 3D animation, as I was slowly finding a workflow that felt natural to me: I would usually block out the most important body parts pose by pose, while tackling more simple movements and adding some follow through directly in the spline.

For Lip-sync week, Ramon Arango and Noah Demirci taught us a lot about how mouths produce sounds and showed us interesting observations about acting beats and subtle eye darts.

Conveniently, Ramon is also the creator of the Apollo and Artemis rigs that a lot of us had been using for the workshop. So not only did we benefit from feedback and lectures, but Ramon could also occasionally perform some Rig surgery.

Going from stepped animation into spline is always a hard step, but I found that for lip syncing, the smooth motion can feel especially jarring. When we talk, the mouth snaps from pose to pose quite quickly. So when we started splining the mouth, the focus was on getting the energy from the blocking back. Applying this I quickly achieved a satisfying, snappy animation. 

That week we also had a little screening where everyone could show each other projects they had worked on. I was absolutely blown away by everyone’s creativity, skill, and stories. We saw everything from psychedelic journeys through compost bins to silly 80s action movies with bugs and even played a little intergalactic rhythm game. The lovely evening ended with a heated round of Mario Kart in the cinema.

As every Friday, we ended the week with a cozy and delicious barbeque. This time it was also a little farewell for Matze and me, who left the workshop that evening.

The rest of the class was getting ready for their last big task: over the last two weeks of LuMAA, they would tackle more complex, full-body acting shots.

Block 3: Full Body Acting Shot

With the end rapidly approaching for LuMAA we poured all of our emotions into the acting shot. It’s the combination of all that we have learned with more SPECIFICITY. If there is something that our teachers from Pixar want us to remember, it’s this one concept. María Bjarnadóttir (and her partner Alyssa) and Kristen Willsher were focused on this concept and beat it into our heads as it had been drilled into them during their time at Pixar. This “specificity“ is the magic that really makes us see a person within a bunch of moving geometry. It’s the art of holding a look, an involuntary movement, or making specific choices that the character would naturally make, all while achieving the illusion that there is no puppeteer behind the scenes. But to learn more about this, consider joining LuMAA yourself.

Maria and Alyssa were there to help us come up with what exactly we wanted to animate for the following week, block it, and get it to IP (in progress – the stage between blocking and polishing). We listened to dialogue, learned about characters and how people move, and then blocked our ideas out. Meanwhile, they walked around and made sure we pushed our shots as far as we could. “It’s always easier to pull back an extreme idea rather than push a weak idea further“, and so we started with as wild-ass ideas as we could conceive, and pulled back some strings after. 

We had a lot of fun watching Luca together with Maria and Alyssa, a movie that both of them and Kristen worked on. It had become a little bit of a tradition to watch a movie that our teachers worked on during the weeks, sometimes with the teachers present. We also had another delicious Friday BBQ and a tour of the school so that everyone could see the vast number of departments in HLSU DFK.

Kristen was our teacher for the final week, which was all about Polish, her favorite step of the animation process. We also got introduced to splocking, which is a layered workflow, but this time we used it for character acting. With Kirsten’s clear feedback, we all made amazing progress on our shot and pushed it even further – sometimes, it was at the cost of finishing the shot, but on the other hand, we gained a lot of knowledge, experience, and clarity of our ideas.

In the final week, we tried to cram in whatever last activities were still not done yet, so besides a last weekend hike, we managed to go bowling and have a fun afternoon with the game of werewolf. Over the weeks we have done so many fun things together as a group, that helped us bond and connect with each other.

Bundling up whatever leftover energy and emotion within us and pouring it into our animation, we finished our shots. And trust me, the emotions were running high since we all knew that this wonderful time was coming to an end and we would have to say goodbye to each other by the end of the week. The last BBQ had plenty of food and a lot of heartwarming last hugs were given – then it was over. It was a great time and one that I will certainly not forget for a long time.

Once again thank you to Simon Otto, for supervising the course. Michael Aerni, Lukas Niklaus, María Bjarnadóttir, Erica Palmerini, Ramon Arango, Noah Demirci, Kristen Willsher, and Alyssa Ragni for teaching us so much. To the staff at Animation Lucerne for the support and for putting it all together and, of course, our classmates.
See you next year at the next LuMAA.

A striking bell rings out in the dormitory. Students groan, stretch, and yawn. As the morning rises on the rocky cliffs and the warm smell of breakfast fills the humble mountain hut, another day begins for the students partaking in the Out Of Home Animation camp!
This summer, from the 22nd to the 31st of August, 17 inspiring animators coming from the Hochschule Luzern to as far as Berlin, Rotterdam, and Vienna ascended to the Fromatthütte in the Bernese Oberland to partake in the annual Out Of Home Animation workshop. Surrounded by the alpine pasture, and luscious pine forest, and facing a beautiful view over the Bernese Alps, it is in this idyllic setting that we lived, hiked, and created together

Picture 1: Hills and Cliffs.

After a warm welcome involving fresh cinnamon buns and a delicious dinner, we took the time to recover from the intense but wonderful ascension to the chalet and stargaze a little bit before settling into our new home for the upcoming days. We started off the camp with a hike guided by a local artist. He told us about the myths and legends of the area as we snaked through the woods, surrounded by majestic cliffs. He periodically picked up a plant, a mushroom, or stopped next to a rock formation to give us a quick biology lesson, warning us about the dangerous plants and the impact of climate change on the flora. Some of us snacked on some wild blueberries on our way to the top.
On the second day, we had a similar program. We hiked to a mountain lake to sunbathe and take a refreshing jump in the water. It was difficult not to feel like we were in a fantasy book as we walked through the beautiful hills and cliffs and swam to the little flower-covered island in the middle of the lake! As we got to know each other while enjoying the Bernese Alps, we also filled ourselves with inspiration and ideas for our creative endeavors of the week.

Picture 2: the students sitting near a mountain lake. Picture 3: Elena and a student admiring the view.

But living so high in the mountains comes with a few quirks! Water and electricity are sparse, and we had to use both economically. A generator was turned on for a few hours a day so that we could charge our devices and work on editing or sound design. Cooking was in the care of Elena Rast and Lukas and done with an old-school wood fire stove or on a campfire. Showers had to be taken outside in a little standing tent and with a bucket full of water. But those limitations quickly became usual. They are part of the OOHA experience! Helping to prepare the meals, sleeping in dormitories all together, as well as finding new ways to spend time and entertain each other as there’s, of course, no Wi-Fi! This disconnect from the digital world allowed us to be more present, focusing solely on our surroundings and creativity. It cut us off even more from the outside, helping us focus on our animation in this cozy little world that we created in our hut.

Picture 4: A group of students sitting on rocks and listening to the guide’s stories.

Following our few days of excursions and warm sun, a thick fog rose from the valleys all the way to the top, enveloping the hut and cutting us off even more from the outside world. This eerie and mysterious atmosphere gave us the perfect conditions to get in the zone and start to work! As some began by sketching or painting, others were busy building puppets, playing with textures and collages, or even losing themselves in the mist to collect sounds, images, and trinkets. Inspiration seemed to be coming from all around, not just from nature but also from each other, as we talked, shared our worries, and discussed our ideas. Busy in work, under the guidance of Maya Gehrig, and only interrupted by games of Yatzy, the occasional visit of some goats or chubby marmots, everyone seemed to slowly find their flow while experimenting with materials and ideas. For me, it was extremely refreshing to let go of the usual production pipeline, to let myself animate whatever I felt like, however, I felt like!

Picture 5: Student taking pictures on a cliff surrounded by fog. Picture 6: Students deep in work on a table covered in various materials.

At the end of the school year, I found myself running out of creative inspiration and motivation. I was completely paralyzed and kept overthinking and changing my ideas every other day without being able to find a flow or let myself go in the creative process. I was obviously tired and in need of a good vacation. But after that, anxiety started to creep in…what if the same thing was damned to happen in September? Out Of Home Animation was, for me, the perfect opportunity to challenge myself to make a finished project in just about 5 days. The isolation from the outside world, the inspiring students around me, and the focus on more analog and simple forms of animation created the perfect bubble for me to do so!
I will admit that I signed up for the Out Of Home Animation workshop not really knowing what I was getting myself into. It sounded very fun and also a bit intimidating. Yet in the span of 9 days, I met wonderful people, and challenged myself physically and creatively! The bonds we formed and the inspiration we found in the simplest things, like a morning mist or the sound of a distant cowbell, will continue to influence our work. As I packed my bags and prepared to leave this magical place, I carried a heart full of gratitude for the moments we shared. OOHA 2024 was a journey I’ll cherish forever, and I can’t wait to see where it leads us all next.

Picture 7: Panorama of the view and a student admiring it.

Internship at Nukufilm, Niine 11, 10414 Tallinn, Estonia 

Myself working at Nukufilm 

It’s mid-March, and two weeks passed since I started here at Nukufilm. Finished my first props already, which got approved and so I am waiting for my next task while sipping coffee and listening to the head of the studio complaining about the weather, as it turned out, the winter returned. As it was for me the missed winter wonderland, for everyone else it was pure misery after having the cold-bloody and long period of darkness and depression due to the lack of sunlight. Different from ours, the Estonian winter means from November till the end of February mostly 5 hours of daylight, freezingly cold up to -15, and melancholic faces everywhere. And just as it happens to be, I arrived in Estonia, when the first glimpse of sunlight was hitting the surface of the tired faces, now I know why everyone smiled on the day of my arrival. 

Lasnamäe district after a snowy day in March 

As I started out being an assistant prop maker in two ongoing projects, I soon got to know the third project, which will occupy most of my time; The stylized and one-to-one adaption of an illustrated children’s book by Jonas Taul called “A Serious Thought”. It is about a young boy having his first existential crisis and I surely felt being set into a similar situation when I started working on the props of this project. I assume it was the strategy of the studio to create the equivalent of method acting into the prop making. 

Different Props for the Short Film “A Serious Thought” by Jonas Taul 

As I first glanced at the simplified style of the sketches of the objects, I marked it as an easy task, but what followed was my story of an ordeal for gaining pure perfectionism. To build a symmetrical object consisting of a blank-white-textureless surface; Stop motion is known for having textures; was a pain in the ass. To make the endless felt hours of sanding the surface bearable, I ended up listening to podcasts about philosophy. There is a certain humor in it, listening to talks of Arendt, Derrida, Latour, etc. while trying to get the perfectionism of CGI in Stop-Motion. It surely made the repetitiveness meditative.  

A collection of finished Props 

I couldn’t think of giving up and there was nothing more satisfying than when the director finally gave the thump up. In general, the working environment at Nukufilm was gentle and it offered me not the feeling of having dense pressure to reach a certain standard, but to be able to use the working space to learn and make mistakes. And in this, I was able to shine and get more secure in my field of work.  Nevertheless, I started to miss a little bit the multitudinousness of also working on the other projects. When I did again make a silly five-second mistake which forced me again into days of sanding, I just wished to have a break from the black and white.  

Linnahall in Tallinn, a reminiscence of the soviet time 

Now the late period of coldness started to fade away and even though I was an admirer of the frozen and in my opinion poetic landscape, I was looking forward to the week of blossoming, where spring would start. Nature started to be a good relief towards the more moderate and repetitive activity in the studio, they were complementing each other perfectly.  

Wide Landscape behind the Kopli Area 

That’s why I used my weekends to do trips. As soon as I got to the countryside, I sometimes felt like being in nowhere just surrounded by trees and a wide landscape, mountainless and absent from any human being. As I was standing beside the abandoned-looking bench and the sign marking it as a bus stop, I was not sure, if the non-English-speaking bus driver will pick me up. Those situations in solitude made clear how dependent I am on the device I have in my pocket. Google Maps got to be my best friend during my time here. I was always able to return to Tallinn.  

One of the few swamp pathways, you can find in Estonia 

It is the beginning of May and within one week the environment underwent a substantial change of its appearance. Now the forgotten soviet ruins started to be ensnared by beautiful flowers and the landscape started offering a colour range that is unimaginably beautiful to the human eye. While the abandoned places were claimed by nature, visitors started to take the central part of the urban area, and Tallinn got crowded by now.  

Ruins of the Aegna Island 

And in Nukufilm, the arrival of spring meant that the row of ongoing celebrations would start by now, every week flowers were brought into the studio, which meant that someone’s birthday was celebrated. From the outside, it was nice to participate in it, but since my Estonian hasn’t gotten better by now, it was that time where I felt mostly isolated. So mostly it ended in thanking for the finger food and going back to work. 

Restoring Fruit and Veggies for the film “Zoobox” 

The tasks became more varied by now, I was more involved in all three projects again and besides making props, I was now also helping on the set by either restoring objects or making minor adjustments. My curiosity also got bigger, and I started to look around at what everyone else was doing, asking questions and noting down things. And while my daily notebook got filled with scribbles of certain observations, the days also got longer and the nights shorter.  

Set design of the short film “Where do the grown-ups come from?” 

The time of the never-ending sunshine started until it ended up in the longest day of the year, celebrated here as the “Jaanipäev”, the Estonian Midsomer. And as the big fire was burning, I was already in the middle of my last task, making an animation test for the water scenes in the movie “A Serious Thought”. 

Jaanipäev celebration in the town Viljandi 

As it happens, they started to trust me with the task of finding a solution for the stylized water animation. As if I was a scientist, I experimented around on my own for a month with different kinds of techniques for imitating a flowing surface. It was truly exciting and inspiring also for me to discover new solutions. Yet the repetitiveness also didn’t leave me alone here, but to be honest with everyone, I guess that’s part of working in the professional field and I got a lot out of it, repeating after repeating the same thing made me truly learn it and improve my skills.  

Experimenting around animating water for “ A Serious Thought” 

The studio is starting to get quiet, a few people are still here, and the other ones already left for the tranquillity. I am one of the last ones, cleaning up my space.

Like always the ending feels odd, there is just a silent breath of wind when you are closing the door, and a Head Aega; Good Bye; follows. 

Last Day at Work 

Four students shared their experiences and creative processes behind making some murals at HSLU D&K.

Ella Cattaneo

I had never done a mural before, so signing up for this opportunity was very exciting and a bit stressful, but I am very happy that I took the plunge, and so grateful that it paid off! I came up with multiple concepts for the mural, but I decided to settle on one that didn’t depend too much on the format (aka the dimensions of my chosen wall), so that the organizers could potentially move me to another wall if needed.

I also wanted to depict something that related to the school, so I settled on drawing a crowd of students walking to class and choosing to depict them as animals of various shapes and sizes gave me a chance to play with proportions and composition more. I initially wanted each character to represent a specific Bachelor’s, but I soon realized that certain courses were going to be harder to represent visually than others, and that the lines between various art forms were often kind of blurry, so I decided to just freely assign art supplies to the various characters, and let the observer imagine the wider context.

I transferred my sketch to the wall by using the doodle method: I covered the surface with random irregular pieces of tape, took a picture of the wall, and then overlapped my sketch and the picture digitally. I found it much easier than using a grid, although I regretted not using a lighter color for the sketch, as I spent a good chunk of time painting over the sketch lines at the end… Otherwise, the painting was really enjoyable: I first blocked in the basic colors and then did the lineart, the quality of which varied quite a bit depending on how tired I was. I enjoyed being able to work on it virtually whenever I wanted and being my own boss. Compared to what I usually work on also felt much more straightforward: a wall is much more straightforward than a computer program.

The closer I got to the end, the harder it was to finish the project: on one side I felt fed up with the the whole ordeal, on the other side I had been enjoying myself so much that I didn’t want to be done, as contradictory as that may sound. Now that I’m done, I think that I’ll avoid the corridor where my mural is for a while, as I’m quite sick of it, but once I feel detached enough from it, I think that I’ll be able to appreciate it once again.

Janine Varga

Lea and I had the honor of painting a mural on one of the walls on the bottom floor of HSLU DFK. We spent many hours refining Lea’s initial sketch and transferring it onto the wall next to the elevator. A bunch of first-year students from the animation department banded together to send in as many applications as possible to secure at least one wall for the animation department. I eagerly joined in and submitted a simple design, which unfortunately wasn’t selected.
However, the plan was to help other animation students whose designs made it to the final round, so I got to assist Lea with her mural design instead.

I had painted murals before, so I explained some basics I knew from my previous mural projects to Lea, but even with all the experience I had, we were unprepared for the amount of work and frustration ahead. First, we analyzed Lea’s initial sketch and improvised most of the sketch directly on the mural rather than strictly following the initial design. We used yellow charcoal for the sketch, which seemed like a great idea at first but ended up causing problems later.

The first phase of painting was met with frustration when we discovered that other students had contaminated the paints with other colors. This caused the paint to look inconsistent, with darker and lighter shades mixing together instead of appearing as solid colors. This was a problem since we intended the mural to have flat colors only. Consequently, we had to repaint most areas with inconsistent colors, like the orange of the frogs. The yellow charcoal also mixed with the paint, altering its color, which further complicated the process.

Despite our efforts to avoid dripping paint onto other areas, we still managed to do so,
forcing us to repaint several sections, especially during the line art phase. Initially, we were excited about doing the line art, but it turned out to be the most frustrating and soul-crushing part of the process. Although we bought brand new brushes specifically for the line art, we eventually had to buy new ones because the brushes we initially purchased were too big or too rough to paint with. Lea did most of the line art while I stood behind her with three different colors of paint, ready to correct any mistakes. Throughout the process, I took on the role of fixing any errors we made.
In the end, it was all worth it. We were very happy with the final result and learned an important lesson: next time we do a mural, we will keep the line art out of the design.

Lea Glitsch

While I was reading through all the initial information about the murals and the walls that were available for painting, I was quick to choose the wall next to room 079. I‘ve sat in that room multiple times for various art theory classes, so I thought it would be fun to design some characters that kind of “walk” toward the room and try to „interact“ with the door. Since frogs are some of my favorite animals, naturally I had to include them in my concept.

Although I was excited to do a mural, I was also nervous because I had never worked on one before and my painting skills left much to be desired. Thankfully my friend and classmate Jan came to my rescue and we teamed up to tackle this endeavour together.

The sketching stage, in which we tried to bring the initial design from my iPad onto the big wall without the help of a projector, was very tedious and difficult. It made me realize how much I was used to only working on a small screen. Jan had some experience with mural painting already and she was able to correct all my embarrassingly wonky lines. We made adjustments to the design to simplify the painting process and added a few little references to some of our classmates.

The flat painting stage was very satisfying and relaxing (not preparing us for the horror that would be the line art). The only difficulty we faced during flat painting was the fact that many people didn’t clean the shared equipment properly so sometimes old, seemingly dry paint on the palettes would suddenly mix with our fresh paint and mess up the flat coloring.

The line art was definitely the least fun part of it all, it required a lot of concentration and a steady hand, little mishaps would be visible instantly and we needed to do quite some cleanup work with the flat colors to cover up our messy accidents. After some time Jan and I came to the silent agreement that I’d take over most of the line work and she’d stand ready with all the flat colors in case of mistakes and mental breakdowns. I guess after some time you just adjust to the misery of it all and accept the fact that some things just must be done somehow.

Aside from that the overall experience was extremely fun, with Mara and Ella just around the corner working on their own murals. We were all open for a silly chat now and then and seeing everyone’s murals progressing with each passing day was very inspiring.

Looking at the mural now that it’s finished I’m very happy with the result and I’m very grateful that I’ve been given the opportunity to add a little splash of colour to one of the concrete walls of the school!

Mara Biscioni

Personally, I always really liked the hallway area of our school. For one, because it has a nice open space at its end, and for the other, because the floor has a yellowish tone. I don’t really like yellow but hey, at least it’s a color. Most educational buildings I have been to have dark gray floors, which makes the whole ambiance of the area gloomy. Needless to say, the bar for nice, colorful atmospheres in buildings is extremely low. Even in art schools. That’s just sad. It was about time someone killed the white of this canvas. I’m so grateful for this opportunity.

The color palette was set for all the paintings to give a sense of harmony to the hallway as a whole. I initially didn’t mind this limitation since blue and orange go well together. However, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed with the given colors, as there was only one main blue to work with. We had a light blue, two midtones, and a dark one. They were all slightly different hues, which made them look disharmonious. Personally, I would have loved to see more confident variations in the tones. Maybe an almost turquoise? Maybe a purple tone in the darkest blue? But that was a problem for later. First, it was time to lay down some Ideas.

Blue and orange immediately make me think of a nice warm light source. So I made a few sketches around this idea and chose the one that would be the most fitting for our nice little space.

This used to be a rougher sketch but I finished it outside of the mural project. I just thought it looked like the two characters were burning down the circus behind them, which would’ve been a more fitting image for my previous school’s walls.
This one stayed in its sketch form and never got to be anything more but a chaotic color exploration. It would have looked pretty stiff anyway with the four bluetones given.
I decided to go with this one since it featured a lot of people looking at the same light ray, much like all the people in this school have a common interest in art.

I had the pleasure of visiting HSLU last month to do a talk and spend time with students looking at their current puppets and projects.

Having heard great things about the school over the years from various colleagues it was wonderful to step inside the campus and get to meet students who are benefitting from the university’s amazing teaching and facilities. From woodwork to metalwork, to fabrics, ceramics and 3D printers, art schools are a space where ancient processes collide with cutting edge technologies.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about animation and stop motion and how this medium, my preferred métier, sits at a junction between so many art forms. It’s somewhat peripheral and often under-valued, but simultaneously fiercely unique and singular in its capacity for empathetic, poetic storytelling.

In my talk I spoke about my background in theatre, having started in the plastic arts of painting and sculpture, my love of photography, opera, dance, my collections of objects and antiques. Every time I travel  I seek out museums of puppets and curiosities and stalk through antique markets and junk shops and all of these techniques and obsessions feed into my work as a director.

Stop motion is an art form which operates in the real world; what you see in front of the camera is painstakingly built by hand, photographed under real lights, and brought to life by unseen artisans; the puppet animators. It’s a multi-disciplinary process that draws on performance, artistry, technicality, and cinema to create something tactile and tangible which in turn gives the medium a weight and gravitas which perhaps sets it apart from drawn animation or computer animation.

Having recently co-directed a live-action puppet film, I’m struck by the expressive, artistic joys of making with our hands, of mixing media and techniques to tell bold new stories.
In the world around us, we can observe the constant march of technological progress, from devices which control our homes to artificial intelligence creeping into numerous aspects of everyday life, as well as barging its way into the creative sphere, whether we like it or not. But perhaps the question is not ‘Can a computer achieve this faster or better?’ (I would argue ‘no’ when it comes to inimitable stop motion and puppetry in particular) but rather – ‘can a computer have as much fun as I can, making art with my hands?’ Really we need to turn inwards and reflect on why we make work and how the inherent qualities of these practical mediums lend themselves to moving audiences, engaging viewers, and communicating narratives and themes which challenge, provoke, and entertain.
I say, long live the practical, plastic arts, and here’s to many more years of making work with our hands!

If you missed the presentation or want to hear Joseph talk more about these themes, you can hear him speaking about the appeal and inner-workings of stop motion animation on the BBC Radio show Screen Shot alongside Guillermo Del Toro here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001tr6g

Lastly, talking about the making of his short ‘Salvation Has No Name’ and the ups and downs of being an independent director on the ‘Under the Onion Skin’ podcast here:  https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/under-the-onion-skin/id1704806166?i=1000644088772

Text and images provided by Joseph Wallace
https://www.josephwallace.co.uk/

And that’s it for my current language skills in Estonian, an absolutely strange one, which has no connection to any of the languages I already know. Nevertheless, I must admit that it is like music listening to the aberration of the Finnish language. And it also helps to remind me: I am in a new country, I am in the unknown.

Even though this exaggerates the situation, since I am still in Europe and everything culturewise still feels similar. Yes, I must admit, that I was at first a little bit confused and lost in this hyper digital city; had to get used to the digital infrastructure. Coming from the smaller city of Lucerne, Tallinn is a lot busier and there is a lot going on. Not counting mountains, because it’s flat and just straight everywhere you look, but you have the ability to see a clearer panorama of the mixture between Wall Street-like architecture and the leftovers of the Soviet times. Tallinn feels a little bit like a mixture of Scandinavia: a typical modern banking-smart utopian city and traditional Soviet-European antiques. That’s why it feels like a delightful conglomerate of different backgrounds, every corner certainly has a different feeling. The atmosphere of a down to earth Kaurismaki fairy tale in one street, a melancholic Tarkovsky in the other and sometimes the cynical satirical Andersson, when you stand in front of a Ukrainian flag with the tourist tool in hand photographing the St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. And in the middle of it all, close to the centre of Tallinn, you can find a quite small stop-motion studio called Nukufilm. So, let’s talk about filmmaking.

The story of my internship starts with an Estonian meeting, a general Monday gathering. Nothing unusual for the studio except having the Swiss person in it, trying to look like paying attention to the incomprehensible language and then having a short introduction in English.

There was not a lot of time for chit-chat, since they are at the end phase of a French coproduction and are a little bit stressed. Pretty straight forward, I got an atelier surrounded by a lot of tools. My first job is in props and so I started working. And oh, how do I like this studio, the working atmosphere is so friendly and from the first day on, I felt treated like being on the same level with all the employees. I think around 15-20 people work at Nukufilm. Therefore, it is pretty small and you get quickly familiar with the people and the working spaces.

After a week I already feel settled there. It feels normal to walk into the studio. Adapting to the work field was easier than I thought. Also holding back my will in creating my own things is pretty easy, I am capable of shutting it down and just do the things I am told to do. I am in this mindset from 9:00-17:30; the usual working hours of the studio; and can easily leave it behind when I step out the doors.

Now everything sounds so smooth, but let’s go back to the start and remind ourselves of the language. The language barrier is and will still be a topic for me. English is not the main language here, also not in the studio. I was surprised when I arrived and realised, that not everyone is good in English as I thought. Most of the studio members have sufficient knowledge of English, but sometimes there are still some problems in articulating certain information. Nevertheless, it worked out well this week, but it also underlines my status as an outsider. And even though I feel comfortable around here, I still have to get used to this fact.

I don’t know the Estonian word for goodbye yet, so when everyone leaves, I just simply mumble a BYE.

Markets. Who doesn’t love them?
Stocks, fleas, Christmas, so many things to buy! But none scratch quite the same itch as the Helper’s Market here at the HSLU.
What’s for sale here, you may ask? Experience. The third years and master students, who by now are hard at work with their graduation projects, show us what they’ve been cooking all this time. They get up on stage, show their animatics and tell us how students and alumni alike can sign up to help their projects come true.
I can’t talk about these projects in detail just yet, so I decided to interview the third years and get the scoop on the behind-the-scenes process. The nitty gritty stuff. What do they do when the teachers aren’t looking? How do they organize themselves? What’s their favourite colour?
So join me as I get down to brass tacks with members from the upcoming «Gahts no Lang?» and the team behind «Weird Receptionist».

How has it been like organizing, scheduling, and working on a project of this scale?

«It‘s equally exciting as scary sometimes. On the one hand you get to spend a year trying to make your ideas come to life, on the other you have to commit to them for an entire year.
It‘s also been a big joy working with a new constellation of the sweetest people who also happen to be amazing artists!»

Sven Kristlbauer, director of «Gahts no Lang»

«I would say I don‘t really think about it that way, it is just the next step. We did short projects, then a 6 month one and this one is a year. That is a step but there will be more of these! But it is truly amazing.»

Marion Zeder, Gahts no Lang

«Probably a bit different for every team but for us it was the most stressful at the start (might be because of the nature of our movie, which had no defined story at the beginning).
Once we had the story set, it became way easier but was still a lot to handle with all the meetings and deadlines. Most teams we talked to were agreeing with us on it being stressful due to having a lot of things going on at the same time.
Now that we are in/transitioning into the production phase, where we know what we want the project to be like, it has become quite chill, and we are having a lot of fun.»

Sina Lerf, Dario Marti & Dario Boger, a.k.a. Team Reception

Any unexpected challenges so far?

«This is the first time I‘ve been directing a group of people on my own, which sometimes means I spend a lot of time putting ideas into words to get them across to all the people involved. Being the director also means making a lot of decisions, which is very fun and creatively fulfilling, but also daunting at times.»

Sven

«Having to organize a lot, plan for other people than me or the 3 of us and include having to make interviews and decisions about people that are way more talented than us in their own field.»

Marion

«Idea finding…
As stated before, we might be a little edge case, but we had a hard time of figuring out our story. We had the world, and we knew what we wanted as a rough outline for the story – a reception and crazy guests. But having to write a story while having already a pretty clear image on the setting/the frame was way harder than expected.
We ran in circles for almost 2 months straight, building a story, reworking it, salvaging the parts we liked and restarting again (might not have been of much help that we got a lot of conflicting feedback, too).»

Team Reception

The bachelor film is a big project. What drove you to tell this story?

«Real life experience and the fact that people are very weird (not in a bad way) and that the resulting interactions are fun :)»

Team Reception

«Sven pitched this idea. He‘s the director and writer and I personally just felt like I could relate a lot to the topic and story. Also, visually it is a very cool style, I really wanted to be part of this!»

Marion

«I just hate driving and love toy designs from the 2000s to be honest.»

Sven

Was there anything you learnt from working on previous projects (1BA, Idents, etc.) that you brought over to this one? (Work ethics, communication, skills, anything you can think of!)

«Phew a lot to be honest, you always learn stuff for future projects! I did some 3D blocking for the ident to help with the more complicated perspective stuff. And I did an internship in the 4th semester that taught me a lot about TV Paint and animating in general. Those two things helped in a major way I guess :)»

Sven

«Communication is key. You don‘t have to speak 100% of your mind, but if you are part of a group and something is bothering a team member or making it hard for all, people need to talk and figure out how to go on with it if not fixing it.»

Marion

– How to work in a team
– It matters how you and your teammates vibe with each other 🙂
– Animation doesn’t have to always be done in the perfect way. It can be rougher if the style/story fits it.

«It has to be fun and if the quality suffers a bit under it it’s okay 🙂 It’s a school project in the end (our approach). »

Team Reception

How was your first Helper’s Market like?

«The first helper‘s market was intense, I was interested in a lot of projects, and it was hard to decide, but on the other hand, I didn‘t feel confident enough about what I could do to help, or to ask more tasks, because I was afraid to fail or to do something wrong for someone else‘s project. Intimidated as well as inspired.»

Marion

«It was crazy that we already got to see it from the other side. I felt nervous at first, but seeing the people react to our animatic was very fun. It was kind of the first bigger test screening we had.»

Sven

«Our first Helper’s Market we attended:
Very cool to see what the 3rd years are cooking and what is going on in the 3rd year. Seeing all the projects was inspiring (very nice projects) but at times it would have been fun to give feedback to the movies (but it was too scary o.0)
Our first Helper’s Market we held:
At times it can be weird working on the project, and you lose a bit the perspective of who you are even making this film for. And seeing so many people laughing/enjoying watching the animatic was inspiring and reassuring for us (but also again scary since we have only shown the animatics to people who knew the project from the beginning… but also scawwy)
So all in all the Helper’s Market for us was fun to attend (seeing our classmates current state of the project was also a nice bonus)»

Team Reception

Is there any piece of advice you wish you could tell your younger self?

«I don‘t really know. I worked a lot to make progress. Maybe too much. Have more rest and keep some free time to enjoy with friends, family or anyone that matters to you!» – Marion
«Be ready for the pitch of your idea. Have at least a general plan of how the story could unfold, doesn’t have to be the final version but any guideline for entering preproduction helps. (this comes from us suffering for 2 months because we were struggling finding a coherent story that implemented all the things we wanted)»

Team Reception

«Worry less.»

Sven

And lastly, what’s your favourite colour?

«Oof, I don’t know. Blue maybe?»

Sven

«I like Coral. Or Turquoise. Or purple. Is it a real question after all? (I can‘t pick I want to use them all)

Marion

«#8777E6 #E37D5B #5BA8E3
ik we are just too funny»

Team Reception

There you have it! The Helper’s Market is just one out of many milestones the third years have to reach on their way to a finished film. To get out there and tell a story takes guts, but it takes a village to finish it. Storyboards, animatics, scripts, voice acting, soundtracks, sound design, rough animation, clean-up, colours, backgrounds, compositing…

The amount of people involved in these productions is huge, and to be given the chance to participate in these crazy projects is a huge honour. I wish the third years well and I can’t wait to see the finished films.