How a Mexican studio turned children's drawings into animations for Berlin's winning film & # 39; Los Lobos & # 39;
To begin with, the young actors were asked to draw these creatures. These sessions allowed the animation team to firsthand access their uninhibited artistic sensibilities. "We as adults wouldn't have imagined wolves that way," said Paula Quintanar, animation coordinator and storyboard artist, of the colorful drawings they presented.
Ezequiel Garibay and Alonso Navarro, co-animation directors, used these designs as the basis for the children's aesthetics of the characters that arrived on the screen. Some changes have been made to facilitate animation and preserve consistency, while minimizing execution times. Platypus artists differentiated the shapes of wolves without altering their essence: one became a circle and the other a square.
Initially, Kishi and the team planned to create four animated segments, but in the end, only three were completed. The first uses as a canvas one of the walls of the small apartment where Max and Leo spend most of their time. This moment serves as the entry point for live action footage into the animated world. While the Platypus team worked on the projects, the director shot with the actors.
In the main narrative, the mother finds paper flyers while looking for a job. He takes them home and, after scolding Max and Leo for drawing on the wall, they draw on the flyers. The remaining two animated segments, as well as the fourth that has been cut, are represented as drawn on torn paper. As a result, there are no intricate landscapes or backgrounds.
The demolished sequence would show the wolves fighting monsters from the realm of reality. The villains in this battle would have been elements of those flyers, like a refrigerator from a garage ad or a disembodied torso from an Oaxaca-style massage promotion. They allegedly confronted a Chihuahua from a "lost dog" ad.
This sequence was dropped because it looked too much like another scene that made the final cut, where wolves fight monkeys. This confrontation mimics the violence and crime surrounding children in reality: their home is in a marginalized neighborhood.
The moving third segment sees the wolf brothers face their complicated feelings for their mother, who brought them to a foreign land for a better life, but must leave them alone all day while working. By shortening and simplifying some animated scenes, the team enhanced the children's emotional progression.
The visual development team has generated the flyers we see in the community dashboard, with the phone numbers of people looking for their pet or offering services. "We try to emulate in the best possible way the fusion between the reality of children and their imagination through these tangible elements and animations," added Roberto Miller, background designer.
A challenge for both the animation and live action teams was to create the illusion that the designs were actually on the wall or in the flyers. This affected things like the animation team's use of color and the finishing of their lines. During the filming they kept in constant contact with the director and his team.
"The information we got from the live action set helped us decide what actions the animated characters would do," explained Machuca. “The design phase was of vital importance to us right before starting the animation, because it allowed us to think carefully about the movements of the characters, the number of shots and the difficulty and complexity of each, as well as the limited amount of time. in front of the screen we had to broadcast it. "
Initially, the team tested on TVPaint and thought about using it because its brushes and bitmaps seemed more in tune with the nature of the project. However, the studio's entire portfolio exists on Toon Boom. In the end, it was easier to adapt the brushes in Toon Boom than to shift production to TVPaint. Earlier in the process, artists tried to use real paper and pastels to achieve real textures, but the costs forced them to go digital.
Another challenge was to make the images appear as if they were created by children, without deviating from the basic animation parameters and making things too difficult. Part of the solution was to use double exposures to simulate the movement of the line when the characters were still.
"Every two frames we redraw the shot so that the line looks like it's jumping," said Navarro, co-director of animation. "When the characters move, we don't need to redraw it because we're blasting it through the action, but when they were static, we redesigned it to create that effect." Later in the process I learned that there is a plugin in Toon Boom that does this automatically. "
"To help me enter the space of the head [of childlike drawing]" Garibay added, "I discovered an old box of my childhood drawings that my mother keeps as a treasure and I spent hours observing the logic and characteristics of those drawings to connect with the old me. In addition to being a fun experience, doing it helped me loosen my hand by drawing the characters and the world in animation. "
About 15 people in Platypus, practically the entire studio, have lent their talent Wolves covering everything from storyboards and animatics to character design, color, cleanliness, animation and composition. Platypus was also responsible for the film's animated credit sequences.
Other recent projects include animation's contribution to the "Untold" series of promotional announcements for Disney +, in which prominent personalities recall memorable anecdotes related to their creative work. Platypus is the first Latin American studio hired to work on the recently launched streaming platform. Last year, they also produced a tribute video for the Guadalajara International Film Festival based on the work of Mexican animation figure Jorge Gutiérrez.
