From silent-movie masterpieces to the present day, all the jobs that going into creating the magic of cinema.
This year we open our workshops on cinema trades to secondary school student and offer young people deciding on their future jobs a showcase that is serious but also good fun.
We’ll discover everything that’s involved in animation techniques.
Animation
“Any form of sufficiently advanced technology cannot be distinguished from magic”, said Arthur B. Clark, author of the science fiction novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” that Stanley Kubrick brought to the screen.
Animated film is the best interpreter of his thinking.
What else would you call the amazement that must have been aroused in 1889 by Emile Reynaud’s “théâtre optique”, a complex machine that, thanks to a play of mirrors, projected figures drawn on a roll of paper onto a screen? It is considered the forerunner of animated drawing. Transforming drawings, objects and any static figure into “movement” is the great magic of animation, which in more than one hundred years of history has explored many techniques, with no limits except imagination.
Today animation has reached such a high level that one wonders where the border is between “real” and “fake”, since you can create an entire film in computer graphics where “real” actors and sets have been generated by sophisticated software.
What progress animation has made! From the praxinoscope it has gone beyond the Disney cartoon and today is the medium most used, not only in traditional fields like television, cinema and multimedia but also in the sector of corporate, institutional, scientific, economic and marketing communication.
Master class in animation with the Studio Bozzetto & Co.
Studio Bozzetto & Co. is a production house and animation studio founded in 2008 by Bruno Bozzetto, Pietro Pinetti and Andrea Bozzetto to bring technological innovation to a long tradition of classic animation.
The studio was created to produce short subjects, feature films, TV series and commercials in animation, using a variety of techniques that range from 2D (classic and vector) animation to cutouts, from motion graphics to 3D. Each single stage of product creation is done in-house for complete control of the final result.
Program
In the first part of the workshop the history of animated cinema will be told, from the Magic Lantern to digital 3D, with a screening of the best-known films.
Afterwards there will be an illustration of how animation can be applied to the working world: commercials, special effects, TV series and films.
The third part will focus on presenting a work by the Studio Bozzetto and explaining all the steps in production: initial idea, script, storyboard, 2D or 3D animation, compositing, music and sound effects and final editing.
Finally, the practical part, in which participants are involved. A demonstration of actual production, i.e., creation of a short 3D animation and shoot with the students.
The two parts will be combined to get a video in which the animation integrates with reality.
Participants will be able to test the Maya PLE program, the one most commonly used for today’s 3D animated movies and videogame design.
