Our film had its Swiss-German premiere at Fantoche International Animation Festival in Baden and we’re thrilled to tell you that we’ve won not only one but two prizes at this years festival. The jury selected our film for the “Swiss Fantastic Award” and the youth jury with the “Swiss Youth Award”. Don’t believe us? Then check out the winners picture below! A big thank you to Fantoche and to the whole crew that made this possible! The next opportunity to watch the film will be at Encounters Film Festival in Bristol from 24th - 29th September.
The festival run is taking its course right now and both directors and the producer have set off to visit three different international festivals at the same time. Fredi is at Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico, Beni at Anibar Animation Festival in Peja, Kosovo and Marwan went to Anima Mundi Animation Festival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We’re psyched to have our film shown at such amazing festivals all around the world and the next one is already around the corner. We’re not allowed to say which one yet but stay tuned to learn more. Until then we say Salud! Gezuar! And Sàude!
After some quiet time away from the project “The Lonely Orbit” will have its official world festival premiere at NIFFF (Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival) in the beginning of July! Since the premiere is finally here we’ve also uploaded the trailer to give you a glimpse of the finished film. Check it out and please share it with everyone who might be interested.
Watch this space as we’re going to update festival premieres, news and impressions on this blog. See you soon!
….but one giant leap for our production team. The production of the Lonely Orbit is officially done! We’re overjoyed and also a bit tired from these 9 long month of production time. Next up is the festival run so watch this space for news on where to watch our film on the big screen, the movie poster, trailers and much more. Until then we’ll leave you with these happy faces captured at the moment we’ve officially finished production.
As we’ve stated before, sound makes up a whole lot of the experience when making a film so it’s time to give our sound design and sound mix team a proper shout out. As we’re in the final stages of compositing Kilian Vilim and Thomas Gassmann are making sure that all the bits and bobs are sounding just they way they should.
Props to our voice actors aswell. We don’t have actual dialog in our film but the characters in the film still needed sounds for their reactions and behaviours which was fun to record. But see for yourself how Will Crook did it in the video below.
Thomas in his private sound studio.
Advanced sound design discussions with Kili.
We hope you had a terrific christmas time and new years eve because we sure did! The extra calories we’ve saved up on during these days are being put to good use now for the final push. Clean Up is basically done and all that’s left to do now are the compositing, camera movements and some touch ups. It’s time to roll up our sleeves as high as we can if we want to hit those festival submission deadlines in February. So wish us luck and enjoy these film stills in the meantime.
Our composer Luc Gut is back in the game since we’ve hit picture lock and he’s updating his first draft of compositions. The music of “The Lonely Orbit” is made electronically since we’re targeting to create a retro-futuristic atmosphere for the film. Luc is working like a man on a mission in his charming little studio in Zurich. This will be the last blog post for this year. See you in 2019, our release year.
Since we have our final picture lock now it is time to record and set the sound effects for each individual Scene. In order to create an original soundscape for the “Lonely Orbit” we’ve had a foley recording session with foley artist Dieter Hebben. He’s the guy who has all the right ideas for real life objects that sound like they could be from the future. He then sets his stuff up in the studio and goes through each scene together with the directors and the sound team. Here are some impressions from the recording session.
View from the control room
Foley Gadgets
Maximum concentration
We’re back with something visual this week. Since “The Lonely Orbit” is going into Clean-Up right now we wanted to share the transition from the first storyboard panel to the cleaned image with you. Pay special attention to the keys and the Inbetweens. Even though the motion in this scene is quite subtle you can see a huge difference and lots of nuances between these two production phases.
Storyboard Panel
Rough Layout
Final Layout with Background
Keyframes and Breakdowns
Inbetweens
Cleaned Image (Work in Progress)
Sorry for the late update. We’ll promise to make it up to you by updating the Blog for the next two weeks in a row. The Lonely Orbit is coming along really nice and we’ve got plenty of interesting and silly pictures to share!
Like this one from our recording session for the voices of Dan and his buddies.
We don’t have proper dialog in our short film but we still needed samples for Dan and his friends to set a warm and friendly mood. In order for that to happen we invited a bunch of our friends to the studio and recorded an improv session that was vaguely based on a script that Fredi, our director, prepared for them. I’m happy to say that these guys really had some chemistry going on after a couple of minutes of getting to know each other and they really started to get into it. Hopefully you’ll be able to hear them in a cinema very soon.
Our keyboard keys are clattering and our pen displays are heating up. We’ve got 5 people animating on “The Lonely Orbit” in our studio. Spirits are high and it’s exciting to see our storyboard finally coming to life.
Our director duo is simultaneously working on the edit and the timing to incorporate the newly animated scenes. They constantly discuss the edit and the animations with each other and the other animators. Usually they don’t look so dead serious though.
The last Backgrounds have been drawn and now it's time to start animating. I'd like to say that this is where the magic happens, but up until now all the steps have been pretty magical. The cool thing about this production phase is that the most people are working on the project at the same time so our studio is really buzzing at the moment. Before we're going to show you first animations on this blog though we have one last Background timelapse recording to share with you. Enjoy!
As our Layouts are done and plenty of backgrounds have been completed its time to say goodbye to our Layout/BG artist and friend Nico Kast. The bad thing is that he's leaving, the good thing is that he'll definitely be back with us on future projects. The picture below demonstrates him drawing with his mouth to rest his hands between drawing. That's just how good he is.
Thanks for your hard work Nico, you'll be missed! Be sure to check out all his other cool stuff on his website.
One of the many layouts that Nico prepared for The Lonely Orbit.
The layouts are in the bag and we're moving on to the next phase of production. Our creative team is currently cooking up beautiful backgrounds. Have a look at all the steps of how a background is drawn in the timelapse below.
After getting into the groove our layouts have started to take shape rather quickly and we're in the closing stages of this phase. While working on layouts Fredi, our director, has been simultaneously tinkering on the definite look of our main character. Pleased to introduce you to Dan.
The animatic is finalised and production has moved over to the design phase. This means that we’re currently working on model sheets and the final design of the film right now as well as on the layouts of the separate scenes. We’re tinkering around with different ideas to get the retro futuristic style we have in mind just right.
Turnaround of the satellite.
Even though the scenes were fixed in the storyboard and animatic they are all going to be overhauled to get the most out of each shot and to intensify the atmosphere of each moment. The talented Nico Kast will help us during our layout phase.
Versions of the satellites camera opening and closing.
Work on the animatic of our film is in a pretty advanced stage. We've been tinkering with several versions and started to put in the first compositions of our composer Luc Gut to get a better feeling for the timing.
For everyone who doesn't know what an animatic is: When the storyboard is done you take all the little thumbnails that've been drawn and try to fit them all together in an edit of the film. This way you can see if everything works the way it was intended, if something is missing or if some scenes or edits are unnecessary. Needless to say, that the storyboard also gets overhauled during that process. When the edit is advanced enough rough sound effects are added as well as music to help determine the timing and pacing of the film.
There's more than one way to go about this. Many productions work with placeholder music since the directors often already have a clear idea of what kind of music or sound should be played in certain scenes. We wanted to avoid this as much as possible though since temp tracks (that's the industries term of these placeholders) often mess with the creative vision of the composer and they can avoid the conception of an original score and turn it into more of a knock-off. That's why Luc Gut has been providing us with new ideas and new versions of scores while the directors have been changing around the animatic simultaneously to edge closer to the final result as a joint effort. For that reason, directors and composer had to meet up frequently to keep the exchange of ideas going.
As soon as the rough arrangements are approved by everyone and the animatic is deemed water tight the next production process will be green lighted and Luc will have to wait for almost all the animation work to be done until he gets to put the finishing touches on his score. Luc has done a wonderful job so far and we're psyched to hear what he will come up with next.
Two years in the making this week finally marks the start of production of our first short film «The Lonely Orbit», a 2D animation project which will be directed, produced and animated by Team Tumult.
We’re going to cover our work on the film on this blog, so feel free to check in regularly on news, images and other snippets of our upcoming animated short. For now we’re busy with the final changes on the storyboard before we start putting together our first animatic. Watch this space!
