Over the past few weeks, I’ve been animating a short film which will introduce one of the categories of short films showcased in the London International Animation Festival (LIAF). I pitched a story about “a group of aliens who are trying to infiltrate Earth, but one of them gets distracted with a newly found obsession” to introduce the category “Being Human”. When I found out that this was the name of one of the categories, I thought it would be interesting to explore the question of “what means to be human?” from the perspective of characters which weren’t humans, but were pretending to be. And, I believe, as odd as it may sound, it is very similar to the feeling that one has when one tries to fit in, and pretend to personify what they think everyone else believes is “normal”.

This story takes place in St. Joseph Boys School, and the audience is introduced to this place’s standards of “normality” from the speech of the Headmaster, who runs a school for the world’s “strongest and most powerful MEN”. He’s speaking to two green one-eyed parents, Mrs. Tututwone and Mr. Tututhri, who were called in to discuss about their son, Tututu, who doesn’t meet the headmaster’s expectations. We hear three characters strutting in singing, with Tututu in the middle, cross-dressed as Britney Spears in “Baby One More Time”, with his two best friends side by side. They are not trying to look normal, because they have found in each other normality in wishing to exude the same feminine energy as their pop icon. This comes to great disappointment to the headmaster who reacts in shock, as well as Tututu’s alien partners, who were also pretending to be his human parents. The audience is taken to the inside of the alien’s car and Mrs. Tututhri confronts Tututu, to discover that he feels defeated and unsure about their mission. The aliens can’t understand Tututu’s reaction, explaining that he just needs to “act like a human”, to which he responds “but I am human” as he stares at his friends from the car’s window.

This story is quite an ambitious one for a 45 second film, which brought me various problems at the early stage of the animatics, when trying to decide the necessary shots to convey all these ideas. I have worked mostly, at this point, in stop-motion and so I wanted to take this opportunity to explore storyboard, character design and 2d digital animation. I chose 2D because I hoped to be paired with 2D animators who could teach me and help me improve my own skills. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen and I ended up taking most of the animation role which has been both incredibly time consuming and a massive responsibility. However, in this process I feel like I have been able to learn a lot, the most important thing being that I have to keep exploring different stop-motion animation techniques in the future, because even though I love drawing, especially storyboard and character design, I feel much more stimulated to build and create three-dimensional elements and animate with them. Having said that, Bianca made me very aware of cinematography and camera angles, Michael made me think about rhythm and pace, and Ariadna made aware of context and contrast regarding the characters, the dialogue and the backgrounds.

It has taken me 2 weeks for the animatics and 4/5 weeks to animate with the help of Chongwen and Steve, which leaves me very little time for everything else. I was teamed up with Chongwen and Muneera to develop “Oh Baby Baby”. Muneera had once told me in the past that she was interested in 3D and maybe even in working for video games, and Chongwen is a strong illustrator who shows a very good sense of light and texture. In order to develop this project in the best of our abilities, and as enjoyable for everyone as possible, I thought of having 3D backgrounds combined with a “hand-drawn and watercolor painted” look, to be as similar to the 2D animation and as evocative of children’s books as possible. At this stage, with less than two weeks before the submission deadline, I will have Chongwen starting clean-up and coloring tomorrow, Muneera is finishing up the backgrounds to start taking the shots in the coming days, and myself with three days of animation left to do, so that I can start adding texture to the colored/cleaned-up animations afterwards.

I don’t really know how well I have been executing my job as a director, to be honest. But I am also aware, that I have to be the best version of myself in the next coming weeks, so if I haven’t been the best director yet, now is that time to start being! I have taken most of the job so far, but now I’m getting to the stage where I need to pass the baton, and I’m afraid my colleagues won’t have enough time to finish it up – so I guess, the most important thing will be for me to be as supportive as I can be.