Introduction
The road to the production of Moravilla was complex to say the least, it has been one of the most difficult projects we’ve ever made, but the most enjoyable as well. Now that it’s been amost eight months since the project started, and after having gone through several national and international festivals, I think it’s time to share part of the creation process. It all started with the call of entries for the Ecofilm Festival, an annual contest of Mexico City that aims to create short films with ecological purposes under four different categories: Fiction, Documentary, Advertising Spot and Animation. This year’s theme was “Sustainable Food” and I considered it a great opportunity to be able to explore the new knowledge I had learned in recent years with Blender and Cycles.
The inspiration
When you’re thinking about the script, inspiration can come from anywhere, in my case, the brainstorming has always worked for me while listening to music. I try to rescue words that live in the lyrics of my favorite groups, write them down and try to incorporate characters with that brainstorm. In the end, the brainstorming is about rescuing the most important parts, since many keywords always arise junk ideas and you have to know how to be very self-critical and define if the story has potential or you’re going through a predictable plot, cliché or simply not very functional.
Sample of initial junk ideas:
- Parallel Dimension
- Catharsis in a bite
- Alive food
- Balance
- Food
- Magic
- Two worlds symbiotic relationship
Ideas that are taking shape:
- Oatmel with fruit
- Forest berries
- Market
- Farmer
- Shelter
- Robin Hood
- Employee at the market
Research
Once the idea is gestating it is good to investigate if someone in real life has applied a solution that yoy want to show in your short film, in the case of Moravilla I came across a company called Fruitleather Rotterdam, a company that uses rotten fruits for turn them into leather, later the leather is used to make bags, shoes, seats for cars or even clothes, as is the case of Moravilla.
The Script
Once the main points of the story were defined it was time to make the script. In Moravilla the script had several iterations, for example, at the start the key name of the story was “The Food Repository” name that of course had to change.
For the creation of the script, Celtx was used, and there was a constant attempt to keep the story short, but with the necessary and important key points. At the end to be able to have a story that felt complete it was necessary to include the homeless “Don Guiñapo”, a character that appeared at the beginning and at the end with the sole intention that the plot served as a solution to his problem of famine and cold .
With this I conclude the first part of the development of Moravilla, soon will be going up more development logs talking about processes in 3D and Blender.
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