Introduction

With this blog we pretend to reveal the creative process of the short-film Fragments in 10 different fases, which we will publish over the weeks.

The project was initiated in 2011, went into production in 2014 and was finished in 2016.

The entire production process was developed by a team of approximately 15 people, who worked intensly throughtout 1 and a half years, in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.

Althought the narrative was kept almost intact over this time, all of the film's creation process was very dynamic, merging different animation techniques, grafic styles, and working directly with live action, emphasizing the continuity / discontinuity of the scenes with temporal ellipses and with a minimal relationship with the soundtrack.

Next week we will publish the chapter Origins, where we will talk about the research, the script's development and the first drawings.

ORIGINS

This film has been built from a deep analysis of texts, images and videos of the Portuguese colonial war, with special emphasis in Guinea Bissau, from reports of sons of ex-combatants and from my own experience as a ex-sergeant's son.

The video above, directed by a team of french reporters in Guinea Bissau, alwowed me to enter that war in an human scale. The casual way of shooting an ambush, at minute 5 of this video, reveals the quiet and brutal realism from this war, which has nothing of spectacular about it.

NOTÍCIAS

By publishing the master's thesis about the Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in colonial war veterans' adult offspring, Susana Martinho Oliveira studied and analyzed the dimensions of the Colonial War consequences on the portuguese society.

I'll leave you some links below which have infuenced all the project development work.

"War Traumas: Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in colonial war veterans' adult offspring"

( Susana Martinho de Oliveira - MASTERS IN PSYCHOLOGY

Specialization in Stress and Wellbeing - 2008 )

"Women and children also suffer from war stress"

( Público - 08/11/2009)

"Over time we start to get destroyed from within"

( Público - 08/11/2009 )

"The war veterans' offspring also have war memories" 

( Público - 21/03/2011)

Support
(Support for War Veterans' Victims of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Association)

INITIAL PROJECT

THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Unlike all of the previous films, this project was first created from the writing of the script, and that factor connected me more to the narrative design than to the graphic design, as it usually does. Brief topics, written in small pieces of paper scattered around the living room floor started to connect fragments from 4 stories, 4 moments and 4 places, all in a very spontaneous and free creative process.

SYNOPSIS

This is a movie about how the War settles inside the body of the people who get to live it. And then, thousand of kilometers and years after, contaminates, like a virus, other human beings.

SCRIPT'S FRAGMENT

STORYBOARD'S FRAGMENT

FINAL WRITTEN MESSAGE

In the first draft of the project, the movie would end with this message, that would be shown immediatly before the final credits.

Having finished the final version of the film, I decided to remove it because, despite its value, was having a too big influence on the film's meaning, and for me it was important the audience could feel free while seeing it.

FIRST DRAFTS

 

   

The drafts above were still in an early stage of concept, but already had the substantial about the physical features of the characters, as well as some of the technical development details we would later use in production.

CHARACTER GRAPHIC DESIGN

The pre-production begins with character and graphic design development, based on some of those early drafts we shared here. Once the two main characters (Father and Son) appear in the film with different ages and clothes, we figured it would be necessary to find unique and well defined physical features for each one, that would allow us an evident and fast visual recognition, at any moment in the narrative.

MÁRIO

ADULT
first drafts

This character is designed from the actor Hugo Sovelas' physical features, who appears at the end of the film, in a sequence in live action. The first studies are still too attached to the actor's photographic image.

From here on, Mário's design acquires a geometric simplification and becomes autonomous from the actor's photographic reference. We can now achieve a "turn around".

final studies

CHILD

Mário's graphic research took more time than expected. To find a good proportional ratio between the body / head and to keep a geometric design close to grown up Mário, all of this without loosing the physical features of a 6 year old child, were the main challenges.

Since this character would only appear in 5 different shots in the movie, we decided to move on with the graphic development of the character straight on top of the scenarios, with the planned framings.

The own and projected shadows play a significant role when integrating a character in a scenery, but above all in the own character characterization and in the set up of an intense emotional moment.

FATHER

Young

The father's face design is based on a cobblestone, with well-defined features, from which emerges a peculiar nose that will guide the viewer amongst all the other five soldiers, even in times when the shade of the trees reduce them to silhouettes.

Old

The graphic development of the aged father was based on the previous studies. Once again, the own shadow helps to define the head's volumetry and contributes to the portrait of the character.

Mário and Father's "turn around" animations were crucial to understand the volume, the light's course and the graphic representation of the scenes, and became essential working tools to all the project's crew on the following stages.

Soldiers

The soldiers' graphic research was aimed at creating a coherent graphic line with the main characters, that would still allow silhouette reading. Small heads that relate with powerful and agile bodys.

~

The animation and painting of all the camouflages led the team to the limit:
6 soldiers + 6 own shadows + 6 x nº camouflages' spots
drawn, animated, intercalated and painted.
pheeeeeewwwww!!

Supporters

Although secondary, supporters have an important role at the beginning of the film, and that required a detailed work of their faces.

Front car driver

When this graphic development stage was concluded, conducted mostly by Alexandre Pinto and Samuel Alves, we were able to proceed to the next stage: the layout.

GRAPHICS - SCENERY

Before starting the Layout, was necessary to find the proper relationship between the characters already defined, and the scenarios, and from that to discover the graphic universe of the film.
The creation of the scenery came from real photographic collages, something very important in this film by the personal relationship these characters have with this reality, to later solidify it in memory. The digital visual work on this collages, developed by Bárbara Oliveira, ended up having a key role in defining a dense and unique graphic language, where the outline of the characters became unnecessary.

Accident

Hi! I'm Bárbara. Just to put it in context, this was my first professional job - that means the journey in search of this graphic scenarios was also a learning trip for me.
This accident scene was one of the first ones I worked on.
Initially, as the graphism was not set yet, I started by doing some experiments with several different painting styles - Zé, the director, wanted the city to be deconstructed and not a realistic view of a city. Digitally, I started doing some experiments (some of them more fancy than expected!).

Meanwhile, during this tests, the reality present in the film concept was still missing - the live action. So I began to incorporate photos in the scenery, and the way I started doing it was following Zé's advice - "Take the scissors and have fun!".
That was the moment I started feeling more confident about my work, because it was very challenging to "cut and paste" those pictures in order to create a new world.
I used paint in these tests, and it felt almost as if it was covering the reality underneath.

This journey's final result was an intermediary between painting and photography.
Our reality was to exist in this city over a fractured shape, patched with paint, thereby forming the graphic design of the city from Fragments.

Interior of the Car

The car's interior was the first scenery I worked on in the film.
This phase was important to find my most efficient's working method.

You can see here a test I did with acrylic - traditionally painted an acetate sheet and scanned to make the digital assembly. However, this way of working was not ideal for me because I ended up feeling limited, considering the experiments I could do. 
So I went back to digital, and Zé challenged me to make several proposals for ideas I had, in a very sketched way, so we could decide which one would work in more detail.
This method made me lose the fear and pressure on finding the best picture, and so I started working faster.

The remainder of the process to find the car interior graphics was as the example I presented to you before - cut, paste and paint!

Guinea Bissau

The Guinea-Bissau's graphic design process was very different from the city process.
The forest graphical environment had to be different from the city where they lived.
Chatting with Zé, we came up to the conclusion this environment would not have photographs but only painting, to depict Mario's father's memory.
So I began by doing black and white tests, because for me was easier to think about the scenario elements in silhouettes, and that way I would only have to direct the viewer with light, in order to drive their gaze directly to the important action areas.

The forest started by having warm colors, but because of this the scenery was pulling too much attention, making it a bit quaint, and instead we were looking for a more mysterious atmosphere.
Reminding me of the time I experienced deep forests, I began to experiment with cooler colors, working more towards Guinea-Bissau's rainy forests.

Finally, the graphic chapter is closed.  Let's start the next film production stage, the Layout.