Friday, October 21, 2016

Moving POV in TOY STORY

Now with English subtitles at last!


Moving Point-of-View in TOY STORY (english subtitles) from Oswald Iten on Vimeo.

This is a video essay I did in celebration of the 20th anniversary of TOY STORY last year for Swiss German language magazine filmbulletin.ch.

For this version, I have added English subtitles to make it more widely available.

Full text and information can be found here.

Monday, October 17, 2016

FROM HERE TO IMMORTALITY

One of the short films I worked on is officially available online! FROM HERE TO IMMORTALITY had quite a long and sometimes exhausting production history, but writer/director Luise Hüsler showed an extraordinary amount of perserverance and kept the project on track with her positive and collaborative spirit.

From the distance of a few years, I think a lot of her initial ideas actually came through in this mockumentary interview with two aging cartoon stars who never really reflected on their violent relationship. But see for yourself - and share it if you like it:



I animated about 80 seconds of the hand-drawn final act: 6:10 - 6:18 and 6:40 - 7:55 and did some effects animation (smoke and fire) for the cut-out part. All the other hand-drawn animation is by the great Simon Eltz. We approached the hand-drawn part (from 5:55 on) the old fashioned way with bar sheets which we then turned over to Jorge Riesenfeld who - in addition to lending his voice to Jeremiah - did all the music.

Besides doing the layouts and painting all the backgrounds I worked on the final compositing in close collaboration with Luise to preserve the hand-held single-take look she originally envisioned for the interview. On the right, you can see some of the very fast whip pans from one background to the other.