Animating

It is the end of June. 3 months of our time in Ciclic is over and we enter the second half. We have now 6 minutes of the animation which is great news! The weather is finally getting warm, less rain, more sun so we can each lunch outside in the garden with wonderful friends who are also making a short film here in Ciclic, they are Sarolta Szabo and Tibor Banoczki (directors of "Les Conquérants http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVSjdSPfTpM).
Here you can see a very short scene of a race between Vida and Sareh :)

Presentation at the Annecy Festival

This year Annecy Animation Festival and Abbaye de Fontevraud are organising a presentation of our film "Beach Flags". I have to present the project and talk mostly about writing, scénario and the changes it went through. The producers from Sacrebleu, Folimage, Arte, Ciclic, the storyboarder: Chen Chen and the background and colours artist: Jean Bouthors will be there to talk about their work also. I wish everyone could be there. The meeting will be on the 12th of June at 14:30. see you there!
here is a link to the website for more info:  http://www.annecy.org/edition-2013/agenda/rendez-vous:100000301263

Bonjour Armelle!

This is Armelle Mercat! She is working on the water right now since beginning of may. She is adding the waves to the scenes of the swimming pool and I must say she is pretty good at it.
you can see some of her work here:
http://vimeo.com/user14194380

Magnolia tree

JUMELO the lovely couple animators

Jumi and Eloic are animating on my film. It is fun being together, this time for work. We've been given a large space to work in with lots of light. It is perfect. Armelle will be joining us begining of May. The animation is going very well and I am very happy with what we've got so far.
Yesterday The weather got really warm here, it was lovely to take a walk around. here in Ciclic, in front of my desk there is a window to the garden and there is a magnificent magnolia tree FULL of light pink flowers. I will put up a picture of it soon. It distracts me a lot as it is so surreal to see a tree with absolutely no leaves and full with flowers.
I have to finish the Posing and start animating soon! OK back to work!

Animating, day 4

Jumi and Eloic are animating the first sequence and we've 22 seconds by far. I am doing the posing and hopefuly will soon join them! we've got 11.40 minutes to animate and only until end of september here in Ciclic. It rains a lot here in Chateau Renault which is not so bad when you have to work and can't go out!

CICLIC in Chateau Renault!

We are In Chateau Renault at Ciclic, see more on the site:
 http://www.ciclic.fr/actualites/beach-flags-un-nouveau-film-en-residence-chateau-renault

we are warming up before animating by drawing the characters.

On Folimage's blog!

 an article about Beach Flags on Folimage's blog:

http://www.folimage.fr/fr/blog/beach-flags_59.4.htm

Layout Posing

I'm doing a little bit of posing before going to Ciclic next week and starting the animation. Unfortunately I don't have the time to really get into it , so I guess I will continue when I'm there, while animation is being done. The animators are Jumi Yoon and Eloic Gimenez and another friend who will be assisting us is Armelle Mercat. you can find the blogs of all these lovely people on my blog. So this is my last week in Valence after over 5 months of work here! it has passed sooo fast!

The voices have been recorded!

 

The voices were recorded last friday and I think all of the actors were just great! thanks to everyone and hope to meet you all again soon :)

Recording the voices

As we will soon start animating, the voices need to be recorded now for lip-synching. We'll be 6 for about 10 voices! I'm counting on the actors to try different characters with different voices/or ways of speaking. The spoken language of the film is Farsi/ Persian so I had to find Iranian actors. It wasn't that easy to do that here is France, or I didn't know that many people, but finally I was lucky to find 4 really good actresses.We'll record tomorrow in Paris and I'll see three of the actresses for the first time! I am in Valence so we've practiced the dialogues over the phone up until now. In the beginning I thought this is strange, but then, I thought practicing over the telephone wasn't such a bad idea after all... you only have the voice so you listen better I think :) let's hope everything goes well tomorrow as we only have 2 hours in the studio!

I just got the news that Beach Flags has won yet another grant/bourse! this time for it's music! Yan Volsy who I have the pleasure to work with will be composing the music for the film and he will be spending a week in the residency of Chaise Dieu with a group of musicians (which my lovely sister is one of them I hope!).This will be next December. great news!

http://auvergne.france3.fr/2013/02/07/pour-aider-la-creation-de-musique-de-court-metrage-une-residence-la-chaise-dieu-195959.html

Women's Beach

New stuff!

We are still continuing on the coloring the backgrounds. Here you can see the rice fields and a jewelry.

Colored backgrounds

Here are some backgrounds with color. We use photoshop and textures that we made with ink, which gives the images a watercolor effect. The location is in the north of Iran, in Bandar Anzali.these background are done by Jean Bouthors.

Background Layout

France / Valence / Studio Folimage / 4th month of pre-production of "Beach Flags"
Thanks to my super layout man "Jean", yesterday we finished the background layouts and tomorrow we'll start coloring them.We've got around 158 scenes to color... a lot of work! but everything's going well and I'm excited to finally see some colors!
okay! back to work!

We added some shadows... must say I like this and I think it's final!

Layout Décors

Today we start the layout for the backgrounds while there is a little risk of changing some scenes in the animatic during the week. Arte has to give me validation to take the next step, but I had to take the chance because Jean who helps me with layout might not be available later and we start by sequences were I'm pretty sure I don't want to change. It is nice to start a new phase of the project.