Animest film festival trailer
The Animest Bucharest International Animation Film Festival is an annual Academy-award eligible festival in Romania. The festival theme for the 2024 edition is "Urban Frames". Starting with these two words, I created the festival trailer from start to finish.
A city can be an alienating place, but it can also be a place of connection.
The keyword "Urban" describes the environment or space, so music would be a great partner to occupy the sound-space. Since this trailer will be seen by thousands of people during this international festival, it is a great opportunity to showcase a local musician. The music needed to sound "urban", of course, but also that I also wanted it to have change to retain interest. (There are too many flat jingles out there, chosen for the sake of convenient editing.) After internet searching and friends-asking, I had found a perfect song, "Almost Always", by the band Kadjavsi. After receiving permission to use this music for the trailer, I edited a section of the music to match a suitable duration of the trailer.
The song has a romantic feel- it starts with a peaceful piano phrase, and later has a "drop" into a noisier electronic section. This romantic aspect calls for a relationship story, so I created another character as a partner to Animest's beloved mascot Sheep- a Wolf.
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As I start sketching a subtle story comes to the surface- a food delivery Wolf working in the busy, lonely city, longing to be reunited with Sheep. As this is just a 1min20sec trailer, many things can be implied without having to explain very much. Instead of a tight storyline, I wanted to lean on mood, and hint at the idea that a city can be an alienating place, but can also be a place of connection.
First ideation sketches
I storyboarded directly on a timeline with the music so I can immediate get a sense of beat changes. In this stage I wanted to test as many ideas as they come. I didn't linger on creating beautiful drawings, but make quick scribbles only to see if the connections between scenes work. The Animest team had given me creative freedom so I had the luxury of leaving the sketches loose- they trusted that the final art will look good. In the animatic sent, I labeled each scene with text description to understand what those loose sketches meant.
Once I had the green light to start finalizing the animation, I started work on the backgrounds first. I wanted the backgrounds to have plenty of interesting visual information, to convey the richness of a cityscape. I had specific layouts in mind for these backgrounds, so a lot of time was spent on gathering enough references to recreate the scene I had in mind.
Some work-in-progress vids
After finishing the 1min 20 sec film, I cut a teaser to create some excitement before Animest releases the full trailer on their socials, right before the festival in October 2024:
For 10 days, this trailer was playing in cinemas in Bucharest before Animest screenings. After a summer of working on this project on my 24" screen, it was an amazing experience to see the final film on a large cinema screen!
Thank you!