The short film Let's Dance, produced and directed by second-year students from the Mataró TecnoCampus, will participate this week in the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the largest and most acclaimed animation festival in North America.
The initial idea for Let's Dance arises during the 2021/22 academic year of the Audiovisual Media Degree students, explains the teacher in charge of the project, Queralt Antú Serrano, who decided last January to enthusiastically accept the challenge of renovating and redesigning the subject of drawing and animation.
From there, his goal was to introduce more practical elements in the subject and in this way the students learned to enjoy little by little the process of the art of animation. Thus, he decided to teach his students the technique of rotoscoping, to help them understand the essence of the principles of animation, and to take into account the details of movement and how to reproduce it.
Rotoscopying is an animation technique that creates visual components by redrawing or tracing one frame with another frame in mind. This technique, which had already been used on several occasions in films such as those of Walt Disney, was developed by the animator Max Fleischer, with the aim of producing more realistic animations by providing them with more natural movements.
According to Queralt Antú, his students created the short based on various fragments of dance scenes from various historical films. After the development of this technique, all the students created a fragment of the short film, drawing frame by frame a wonderful dance sequence.
"The result is an innovative short film, where the imprint of each student is reflected and the music standardizes the entire movement," explains Queralt Antú.
After making the rotoscoping short film, and having learned the principles of animation; the classroom became a production house. Each student chose the role she wanted to play. Together they created different three-minute short film scripts, then they voted for the winning projects that were carried out.
The techniques used were stopmotion and cut-out animation. Both are traditional animation techniques, where volumetry, photography, lighting, the creation of sets, characters and engineering are worked on.
In total, eight short films were directed and premiered in the auditorium of the TecnoCampus in Mataró. After that, they have been circulating through animation festivals around the world.
This audiovisual production has already been selected to participate in many renowned competitions. From September 21 to 25, the work will be presented at the Ottawa International Animation festival, competing against other international short films in the Best Student Animation category.
Held in the city of Ottawa, Canada, the festival welcomes more than 30,000 moviegoers, art lovers, producers and cartoon fans from around the world each September.
In addition, Let's Dance has also been selected to participate in the prestigious Swiss festival Lugano Animation Days, the MICE 2022 festival, the Animare Cartoon Film Festival, the Vernon Film Festival, the DOK Leipzig 2022, the Student World Impact Film Festival and the Frame x Frame Film Fest.
The teachers and students of the TecnoCampus of Mataró are very proud of the wide reception that the short film has received and in the coming months they hope to see their great work recognized by the public.
