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 

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.

Auf einer spärlich bewohnten, idyllischen Insel in der Nähe der norwegischen Kleinstadt Bodø befindet sich eine Gruppe seltsamer hölzerner Kabinen, in denen jeweils eine Künstlerin arbeitet. Gegen Ende des Sommers hatte ich das Glück und die Gelegenheit, zusammen mit zwei weiteren Kolleg*innen aus der Animationsbranche für drei Wochen in eine dieser Kabinen einzuziehen, um an meinem persönlichen Filmprojekt zu arbeiten.

Die Menschen, die ich während meiner Zeit im Arctic Hideaway kennengelernt habe, waren genauso inspirierend wie die einzigartige Umgebung. Da war zum Beispiel Trond, ein norwegischer Künstler, der mir viel über die norwegische Kultur und Geschichte erzählt hat, oder Misha, eine rumänische Metallbildhauerin, deren elegante und tiefgründige Werke mich genauso beeindruckt haben wie ihre Persönlichkeit.

In meiner Arbeit suche ich nach dem Absurden und dem Überschreiten von Grenzen. The Arctic Hideaway bot mir einen abgelegenen und inspirierend schönen Arbeitsplatz, der jedoch nicht an Vielfalt und skurrilen Interaktionen und Situationen mangelte. Es treffen sich verschiedenste Personen an einem von der Welt abgeschiedenen Ort, wo sie sich gemeinsam auf ihre Arbeit und das Zusammenleben konzentrieren.

Das Arctic Hideaway ist eine Residenz, die von der grenzenlosen Leidenschaft der Besitzer und Helfer sowie von uns, den Kunstschaffenden, belebt wird. In Zusammenarbeit mit der HSLU Design und Kunst ermöglichte uns das Arctic Hideaway, unsere Kreativität an diesen Ort zu bringen und in den naturnahen, wilden und dennoch stilvollen und harmonischen Alltag auf der Insel in Fleinvær einzutauchen und uns von ihm inspirieren zu lassen. Jetzt bin ich zurück in der Schweiz und teile meine Eindrücke begeistert mit allen, die zuhören möchten. Ich hoffe, dass ich auch andere ermutigen kann, eine dieser hölzernen Kabinen für eine Weile ihr Zuhause zu nennen.

 

Kampagne Brainfood

Anstelle des Interdisziplinären Moduls – kurz IDA-Modul – kann man auch ein Praktikum machen!

So haben Luzia Schifferle, Tobias Speiser, Simon Ott und Markus Graf, allesamt im fünften Semester BA Animation, auf das IDA Modul verzichtet, um im Team einen 30-sekündigen Trailer für das Technorama Winterthur zu realisieren. Die Musik hat David Eliah Bangerter von der ZHdK komponiert. Sie gingen von der Kampagne Brainfood von Technorma aus (Wie ihr anhand ihres Plakates sehen könnt).

Animatic

 

Es ist bereits die dritte Produktion nach „Zeus“ (2014) und „Plump“ (2015), die im BA Animation in Kooperation
mit dem Technorama Winterthur entstanden ist.

–Leoni Dietrich–

 

 

Wie die meisten von uns Animationsstudenten und Dozenten bereits wissen, ist Ramon Arango momentan im Praktikum bei Pixar. Er hat dieses Jahr den Bachelor Animation in Luzern abgeschlossen. Zusammen mit Haidi Marburger und Nina Hoffmann kreierte er den Abschlussfilm “Proxy”. Mitte Juni verabschiedete sich Ramon von uns für sein dreimonatiges Praktikum.

– Leoni Dietrich –

 

Ramon Arango – Internship Report

Ich arbeite seit 1.5 Monaten im Characters Department bei Pixar. Das Studio befindet sich im Osten von San Francisco in Emeryville. So wie in San Fran ist es auch dort meistens kühl und bewölkt. Lange Hosen und ein Pulli sind zumindest am Morgen und Abend Dresscode. Stefan Schumacher hat’s ziemlich auf den Punkt gebracht mit “Emeryville ist tote Hose”, darum spaziere ich an den meisten Wochenenden in San Francisco herum. Diese Stadt gefällt mir super mit den vielen Hügeln, Donuts und dem unglaublich vielfältigen Mix an Kulturen aus aller Welt. They call it a ‘melting pot’.

Bei Pixar ist Lou Hamou-Lhadj mein Mentor. Er ist etwas ernst aber langsam taut er auf. Mit ihm habe ich am ‘Untitled Fantasyfilm’ das Art Department unterstützt indem wir die 2D Character Designs ins 3D umsetzten (pro Char ca. 2 – 4 Tage ZBrush Sketch-sculpting). Erstaunlicherweise ist das eins der ersten Projekte wo ZBrush verwendet wird. Daraus entstand ein LineUp mit etwa 12 Characters von denen ich 5 machen durfte, um dem Director eine Idee zu geben, wie der Film in 3D aussehen könnte. Nach einer Weile gab es aber nicht mehr viel zu tun, da John Lasseter “dreingefunkt” hat und der Director nicht mehr ganz sicher war, wie die Designs sich weiterentwickeln würden. Das heisst, ich wurde mit weniger spannenden Sachen beschäftigt.
Bei diesem Film gab es auch noch nichts ready zum riggen, also wurde ich letzte Woche zu Toy Story 4 transferiert. Hier modelliere ich im Moment einen secondary character in maya (mit ordentlicher Topologie) bis er ready for shading und rigging ist, und wenn dann die Zeit noch reicht, darf ich noch einen background character riggen.

Es war super spannend zu sehen und zu hören, wie die Designer einen Film in der Anfangsphase entwickeln, wie sie kommunizieren und kollaborieren. Bei TS4 ist die Produktion schon im Gang, darum arbeite ich mehr selbständig in meinem cubicle. Ich arbeite auch eng mit einem Designer zusammen und mit stetigem ‘back and forth’ wird das Model auch immer besser.

Ansonsten chille ich mit anderen Interns und fresse Cereals von der Cereal Bar. Life is good.

Gruss

Ramon

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