Tag: spotlight (Page 12 of 315)

Written and directed by Oscar-nominated (Robin Robin) filmmakers Mikey Please and Dan Ojari.

Synopsis: Alan’s excited! It’s his first day at Lamin’8 — a stale, grey, humdrum lamination company. Oh boy! If he buckles up, stays focused and impresses Gary, his unhinged boss, this might just be a job for life.

But all is not quite as it seems, and when Alan accidentally unleashes cosmic, supernatural forces into the office, he realises that fitting in at Lamin’8 is going to be infinitely more tricky than he ever could have dreamed.

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For Fatu, a simple visit to the grocery store feels as nerve-racking as a lunar expedition: for the first time in his life, he’s wearing makeup in public.

Written and directed by Iiti Yli-Harja.

Filmmaker SouthernShotty describes Watermelon Girl as “the story of a girl born from a watermelon seed in a departed king’s stomach…[who] discovers the true joy of giving and building community.”

Director’s statement: I love the convenience and power of digital art, but there is something magical about analogue art. So, I’ve set out to challenge myself to bring that analogue joy to a digital piece.

I spent a ton of time dissecting crafts, textures, proportions, and more to build a 3D world that felt hand built. However, I wanted to lean into the strengths of digital art and pull off scenes not possible in analogue.

I hope this blended approach to animation brings you as much joy as it was to produce.

Quick Facts:

– All visuals done by myself
– Learned 3D as I went
– 230+ shots rendered
– Around 18,000 frames rendered
– 5 years spent from initial writing to final production

Director Antoni Sendra created this short film about his daughter using more than 2,000 hand-painted frames.

Sendra is a freelance director from Spain who specializes in mixed media projects. He combines animation, live action, stop motion and collage in his work, which includes commercials, documentaries, music videos and main titles.

A Sea Turtle Story chronicles the life cycle of the endangered sea turtle. It is written and directed by Kathy Shultz.

Written and directed by Lara Maltz.

Synopsis: Ashkasha’s curiosity leads her to lose her head and get trapped in the depths. On a mission to find her head, she faces challenging situations, including an encounter with a creature that holds the key to her transformation.

Within a small bakery, freshly born buns eagerly await their adoption by customers. But what happens when they meet their new parent?

Produced by GULU Animation.

My Parent, Neal is a short documentary about director Hannah Saidiner and her parent as they discuss her parent’s gender transition.

Saidiner describes her creative process as such:

“The film was made using a combination of rotoscoped and hand-drawn animation. Frames were first drawn digitally in TVPaint, then printed out. Each frame was colored by hand with colored pencil and watercolors, at 1/4 of their original scale in size. This scale change then heightened the tangibility and texture of the coloring materials when scanned and enlarged to fit the screen.”

Directed by Martine Chartrand. Paint-on-glass animation shot with a 35mm camera.

Synopsis: MacPherson recounts the friendship between singer-songwriter Félix Leclerc and Frank Randolph Macpherson, a Jamaican chemical engineer and university graduate who worked for a pulp and paper company.

Macpherson inspired Leclerc, who wrote a song about the log drives and entitled it MacPherson.

Directed by Uri Kranot & Michelle Kranot.

Synopsis: The Hangman at Home by American poet Carl Sandburg was written almost 100 years ago and is still as relevant and more poignant than ever, as our world slides into dark times.

Through a series of paintings bringing together eclectic fragments of life, strange human behaviors are highlighted. Eccentric or banal, they plunge us into intimacy or embarrassment.

This portrait ultimately suggests that we human beings are much more similar than different.

Directed by Janine Nadeau.

Synopsis: A short film adapted from the graphic novel of the same name, Harvey depicts a young boy who candidly recalls the spring day when his world turned upside down.

Told through the eyes of a child with an overflowing imagination, the short film examines bereavement and coping with the loss of a parent.

In February, 2010, the Chilean town of Juan Fernandez slept not knowing a tsunami was approaching. Luckily, 12-year-old Martina felt a tremor and was able to warn and save everyone in town.

Directed by Leo Campasso, Antonio Balseiro and Carlos Balseiro.

Directed by Éva Darabos at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, Hungary, who describes the short film as “a surreal farewell to a blockhouse area.”

Bye Little Block! screened at film festivals worldwide and won numerous awards, including Best Design at Ottawa International Animation Festival (2020).

Directed by 3rd year students at Piktura: Camille Anne, Julie Vandenbergue, Martin Laurent, Elisa Torris, Camille Leroy and Lucas Foutrier.

Le Cri du Silence screened at 56 film festivals and won 10 awards, including Best Animation Short at France’s Festival FESTIMAJ.