LAYOUT

In Layout, Pinto and Samuel began the construction of each one of the final shots, by setting the framework, the acting of the characters and the scenarios, according to directing intentions expressed previously in the storyboard.

Shot 97

Hi, I am Samuel Alves, author of the shot 97's layout, the scene in which Mário's father, who's sitting on a chair in his living room, enters a war memory and vanishes away from the present time.

The challenge was to get Mário's father racing away from the couch with the mental strength of a young man trapped in an old body. If youth is linked to the strength and agility as opposed to old age, the challenge here was to strike a balance between fast but slightly clumsy movements, featuring a heavy and fragile body.

Shot 23

Hi everyone, I'm Alexandre Pinto, responsible for creating the shot 23's layout, one of my favorites since I was introduced to the storyboard. This shot portrays an intense, unceasing anger contamination that spreads amongst the people in the crowd.

José Miguel intended with this shot to show the different characters evolving to a single living mass, breathing heavily, with the city in the background. Taking into account the continuity with the previous shot, 22, in which all the characters begin to climb up the cars, I initiated the cars' layout design, by placing Mário and the 'front line driver' on top of the image, slightly decentered.

After finding the key characters' position for this action, I started by placing the secondary ones, taking into account the composition of how the final shot should end up.

My layout working process:

     1. First I do a quick sketch, depicting the characters as simple geometric solids (cobblestones, cubes and spheres);
     2. On these grounds, I draw the characters' expressions, clothes and other details;
     3. In a new layer I draw the characters' outline;
     4. From this outline, I paint a baseline color to separate the characters and improve the reading group;
    5. Finally, I do their own and projected shadows, fundamental for marking a three-dimensional body and to improve its integration with the background. 

With the finished layout, these shots were sent to the next phase, the animation.

ANIMATION - KEY POSITIONS

With the finished layout we head to the animation stage with the animators Igor Estevão, João Rodrigues and Samuel Alves. At this stage, the character development is achieved mainly by good management of time between each key drawing. At a second stage, intermediate drawings, strictly drawn between each drawing delivered by the animator, are developed mostly by Margarida Pereira, Dário Santos, Susana Correia and David Silva.

Shot 23

Hi, Im Igor Estêvão and I am the person responsible for the animation of the 23rd shot. In this shot, the intention of the director was to show the effect caused by Mário's inner turmoil, creating a mass contamination around.

For this, we joined all bodies in a single movement. This movement is born in Mário's character to then be extended over the other characters, forming, at the end, a single body who breathes with one single voice.

 

Being Mário the center of contagion, I began by animating him first, keeping in mind a moving, cyclical speed, which gradually loses intensity.

 

When the proposed base movement (key positions) was accepted by the director, I started to animate the characters who were closer to Mário, who turn out to be the most affected by the contagion. For this, I had in mind Mário's movement extending in a string, like the links of a chain, that would influence each one of the characters, later ending up by losing intensity gradually.

And so, from character to character, deceleration to deceleration and time difference between each character, I got to the final result: 15 characters with distinct movements, linked together to convey the mass contamination idea. The lines and red numbers placed in the upper right corner indicate to the intercalators each drawing's number and relative position, in order to get the accelerations, decelerations and required breaks.

Shot 83

I'm João and I had the privilege to be a part in the Fragments' animation process. The film was my first professional experience, so I was a little afraid and a bit contained about what I could give to the final product. I was absorbed in this process for the first 6 months until I felt truly comfortable to risk and not merely make the characters move, but give them life. Fortunately, I was able to animate very different shots, the shot 83 and the shot 87 are great examples of that. The shot 83, for example, required a lot of acting, due to the fact the character interacting with no one but himself, eventually beeing the only action in the shot.

This was a challenging shot on a technical level, because it simulated a semi low-angle shot, which requested for an anormal degree of complexity in the design, compared to other shots. On the other hand this was one of the shots that needed a deeper psychological characterization. Regarding the execution time, this shot was an exception for being animated at two separate times for about five months. Zé initially thought that what he had animated (until Mané removing the two boots) would be enough to portray Mané's decision, but after a first editing draft, we realized the shot needed to be longer and more intense to better link with the live action Mané's naked body. So I animated him undressing the sweater.

Shot 87

The shot 87 required for a completely different type of approach, the fact that this is a moment of high tension and suspense. So we limited the animation to a minimum.

The tension was the main focus here, the pauses followed by various blinks of an eye and then an abrupt action by the character was what we were looking for, rather than an expansive and violent acting as was shot 83.

Shot 97

Here the challenge was to find the various marching cycles adapted to each character, and thus achieve a good balance of power and weight between each body on the moment of impact and fall.

Thus, this three shots' animation was developed at once, continuously, in this long and laborious shot. At a later stage we reframed each one of the shots and animated the side camera movement that follows the characters.

FINAL ARTWORK

Color's evolution throughout the film

After introducing the scenarios, I come now to talk a bit about some of the final artwork process, together with David and Igor. We started the chapter with this colorscript sketch, which I did when I started working in the scenarios - with this study, it was possible for me to see if the ideas I had in terms of color were in accordance with Zé's intentions for every moment of the narrative. Although the colors ended up different in the final version of the film, this first proposal gave me a direction to develop the scenarios I presented you in the graphics chapter.

So this was our first step in order to find out the film's final artwork.

Painting & Integration 


Shot 23

I'm David Silva and I was responsible to paint the basis colors on each one of the characters. After various experiences and various paint tests, we concluded the best method would be to use animcouleur, one extension for Photoshop, allowing a quick advance in the painting surface. The only downside was that it required great accuracy in finishes, otherwise the flaws would became visible when the outline was removed.

For that we follow the following method:

    1. Identify frame by frame if the animated character's outline has leaks, and if so close them, so the later selection is easier and faster;
    2. Paint with the base color all frames (usually the character's skin tone). It has to be as perfect as possible since it provides the basis for the other colors;
    3. Paint all the other colors, making use of different layers for each color, and using masks that allow to incorporate the new layer in the base color layer (as mentioned in the previous point);
    4. View the animation and retouch whenever possible to reverse any secondary vibration;
    5. Using the same masking method, add the final shadow layer which defines the volume;
    6. Knowing the line is almost entirely removed, it's time to decide where it should end up on, again using masks that allow to hide most of it. We decided to leave it, most of the time, in the face and the hands.

Despite the good results, this method would ultimately prove itself to be extremely time consuming, because we had to paint one frame at a time for each color used. In the example above, the outline has been completely removed because it's a wide shot. In the image that follows, you can find the outline was left in the nose and mouth of the child, who appears on a close up shot.

Character's Integration

Here is Bárbara again!
This time I come to introduce you the integration work I developed in the film's final phase. After the characters have gained their flat base paint, I created the textures and volumes for each one of them, which allowed a better linkage with the scenarios' graphic design. After that, we animated the textures in a video layer in Photoshop, so these would follow the character's movements. This process, although a little time consuming, was important for the textures to look as natural as possible and not a static layer on top of the animation.

 

When we had characters close to the camera, in close up shots, I would place also some texture in their shadows. This difference (when the characters are close, they have more detail, and when they are away they lose this detail) had the purpose of increasing the sense of depth in the film. The texture was also animated according to the animation of origin, carefully animated in order to keep a low profile so it would not distract the viewer's main focus of attention, which must be centered on the character and not in the effect.

Finally I did the finishing touches on the scenery, as darken less important areas in the image, making color adjustments and blurs, if necessary, and finally would merge the characters.

After finishing this stage, I would export separately characters and scenarios, in order to finish everything in post-production.

Shot 97

This shot is a good example of our adventure looking for the final image.

Initially, we planned this shot to have the same graphic design made for all the other forest shots. Meanwhile were taken new decisions, and the biggest challenge came when it was necessary to build a larger scenario, to support the camera movement during this run.

However, with the production development, the live image clippings began to be placed in the timeline, assuming the representation of Mário's father living memory. This discovery led, initially, to the necessity to adjust the characters base colors, in order that the live image's integration with the painting would be done the best way possible.

But the adventure does not end here.
We began to feel, at this project stage, the forest where the characters found themselves needed to undergo a change. Inspired by the meaning of the red floor is in this forest, and with Zé's approval, I replaced all forest previous colors by red. This change of environment had a direct impact on the characters, which turned into high-contrast pictures. After Igor animated the scenery, adding also a few shadows, we found our shot!

Post-Production

Hi once again, I'm Igor Estêvão who, in addition to beeing an animator, took over the post-production role. This being the final stage of the project, I needed a reinforced care, and so I worked together with the art director, Bárbara, and the director, Zé. To achieve the final integration of the characters in the scenarios and to focus the viewer's attention on specific points, I would add tiny blurs or small shadings on some visual elements.

When a shot gets to post-production, it comes divided into different parts, idealized beforehand in layout and graphic design. That is, in this shot in particular, there were 11 characters, 3 cars, 3 parts of scenario, smoke and rain. I started by composing the characters and applying the appropriate masks to ensure the correct overlapping of each one of them.

After that, I added the rain and multiplied it several times and on different scales, in order to build a three-dimensional space, entirely filled. Then applied a filter, which had already been set in the initial graphical research, to enhance the colors.

Finally I placed the scenery and began its integration, developing the idea of a three-dimensional space with elements in the foreground and background, slightly blurry, emphasizing through focus Mário's father in the middle of all the strangers. Finally, I added the car's front headlight and its respective masks, so that the rain would be more visible within that area. I also integrated the smoke in the foreground's car light.

Shot 23

In this shot, the director intended the camera to move away while the foreground shot darkened, in a way the crowd would get unified in a massive silhouette, while the background shot got even more light, further highlighting this silhouette. Bárbara created several images of the same scene, progressively lighter but without losing the contrast and color depth. Based on these images, I started composing all the characters and their masks so that they would link together. Then inserted the background scenery and made the transitions between the different light suggestions, in order to find the right rhythm. With these defined times, I started to create the camera movement.

With lots of adjustments and time modifications, we finally reached the end result. It was a work of great cooperation between all, and I may say the space I found to creatively contribute to the creation of this film made this work an unparalleled experience.

LIVE ACTION

The work developed in this film with live image explores the characters relationship with different memory levels. To achieve this, we initially registered this real moments using chroma backgrounds to make it easier to do the characters clipping, for in a second phase integrate those clippings in previously animated sequences.

Father's hands close-up shot

The assembling of this shot, through the manipulation of image fragments which were rearranged later, were the main source on creating the aesthetic approach for the live image of the film.

First integration tests

How to connect two shots representing the same situation, but which have have been designed at different times, with different techniques (live image and animated) and different graphic designs? What formal relationship we want to establish between each two overlapping images, in order to explore the main character's relationship with the past? How clear is that connection when these images come to 24 frames per second? To find answers, we launched the first tests:

Shot 97

Hello, I'm Marta Ribeiro and in this movie I was assistant director for the live image sequences, as well as the camera operator. In this scene, the challenge was to follow the actor, who was running, with the camera, without ever losing the frame. The idea on doing this movement by hand, without any auxiliary equipment, aimed to create an unstable image, that would suit the concept of the film.

Animated image

Porque não queriamos que o movimento do filme ficasse refém do movimento da imagem real, decidimos criar primeiro o desenho animado e só depois filmar a correspondente real dessas imagens. A colagem dos recortes reais sobre a animação ficava assim integrada de uma forma grosseira como pedaços de memória soltos.

Raw Footage

Live image overlaid on the Animation

Final Result

Shot 79

When Zé Miguel realized it would be necessary to include live image moments in the film, we began to study the best way to do it. As testing progressed by trial and error we went on, constructing a language that ended up being applied to other moments of the film.

We shot some scenes on the exterior, but most were captured in an improvised studio in the choreographic center of Montemor-o-Novo, Espaço do Tempo.

There we filmed static shots, close-up shots and travellings. The actors used noses prostheses so we could connect to the drawn characters in the film, as in this shot in which the dancer Filipe Pereira (Mané) is filmed in a situation identical to the one that appears in the animation.

Apart from these images already introduced, which can be seen in the movie, we shot at the same time other scenes with a different goal, to help the animators executing some more specific shots, who lived much of its own human movement. With these live images serving as a starting point, the animators could understand and work other details in the animation.

All images, video and photography, were taken with a Canon 7D.