MA Directing Animation students at the National Film & Television School have been the magicians behind our official festival trailers for the past 12 years. During that time, we’ve been delighted by hand-drawn, stop-motion, pixilation, claymation, puppet, rotoscoping, 2-dimensional, 3-dimensional, hybrid animation… so many techniques celebrated! Each one informed by a considered concept and imbued with the unique personal touches from a Director and their supporting animators.
This year we bring you ‘Tea’, directed by José Prats:
“‘Tea’ aims to convey what this event means for those who love animation filmmaking. Crafting this trailer has personally been a journey of discovery since this was the first time I ventured into rotoscope animation. Everything began with this crazy idea of having a huge amount of tea flooding the streets of London.”
As usual, I began to visualise the story beats in what I consider my best ally as a filmmaker: the storyboards and the animatic. At that point, the feedback from our Directing Animation tutor at the NFTS Robert Bradbrook was key to defining the arc of our main character. Parallel to the execution of the storyboard, our editor Andy Sowerby began to cut the animatic. During this stage he managed to perfect the narrative and gave the right rhythm to each scene of the trailer. For me, having a well-defined animatic facilitates the process of the following stages of production and is key to ensuring that the story will work on the final film.
As I mentioned before, for the character animation we used the rotoscope technique. Animators used live-action video reference to trace the animation over it. I owe a huge thank you to the highly committed and tireless animation team: Cameron Carr, Fêt-Nat Bailly, Elmaz Ekrem, Nitya Ramlogan, and Danielle Rhoda. For the live action reference I want to thank our main actress Mansi Maheshwari and the rest of the cast: Milo Bonnard, Alex Peake, Aliyah Harfoot, Meg Earls, Lisa Ott, Lucas Wide, John Osborne and Jack Duncan.
The tea animation had a specific process itself. While the rough animation was done digitally, the final look was done using photographs of a mixture of brown ink and real tea. Rotem Frimer, our composer, and Alex Faingold, our sound designer, worked incredibly hard to bring the soundtrack to a point where it conveyed the excitement and playfulness of London’s tea-drenched streets. Rotem’s traditional approach to the music has the incredible quality to enhance the particular visual style, and it’s become a trademark of this trailer. It is also worth mentioning that the final mix was perhaps the biggest challenge we faced during the production of the trailer. Fortunately, our amazing sound designer Alex Faingold, thanks to the support and feedback of the entire team, managed to find the perfect balance between sound and music. I am so proud to have collaborated with such a committed team to make this animated project. It was a unique experience and I hope people enjoy watching this trailer as much as we loved making it.
And here’s the finished trailer…
‘Tea’ will appear across our venues and online throughout LIAF 2022. A huge thank you to Robert Bradbrook and Rebecca Havers for helping to co-ordinate this project and a massive thank you to all the students involved!