Masterclass with Guilherme Marcondes (1)

I was lucky to watch the Masterclass given by Guilherme Marcondes at the Anima Mundi Festival in São Paulo. For those who don't know him, a quick presentation: he graduated in architecture in São Paulo and soon started working with animation and then directing advertisment both inside and outside Brazil. He also directed a short called Tyger, which won over 20 awards over the world. More about him here: www.guilherme.tv

It's always cool to learn a bit more about the trajectory of someone in our field, something beyond what we can find in the internet. So I felt happy I could hear Guilherme Marcondes talking for a few hours about his career and showing and commenting on some of his work with more detail. 

--Tyger--

This is a work he's clearly fond about. It was made originally for the Cultura Inglesa  Festival in 2006 using mixed techniques.

The inspiration came from several places. The festival required the project to be based on an English text. He developed the concept with Andrezza Valentin and they chose the poem "Tyger" from William Blake to "guide" the animation. Add to that his hobby of making  night photography of São Paulo and there you go, the story takes place in the darkness of the metropole, with neon illumination that reminds us of Bingo neon signs. He commented that, in the end, the movie is more about São Paulo than about the poem. Still, it's an abstraction, just like a poem is considered to be: there's no clear beginning, middle and end. It doesn't necessarily have to tell a story.

The chosen song (from the group Zeroum) also keeps a rythm, just like it happens in some poems. There is a clear and almost hypnotic beat that goes with the visual development of the animation.

Around the time he was working on the short, he had recently seen a children's play from his friends where the characters were puppets moved around by people dressed in black. The eye of the viewer "erased" the people and followed the story of the characters. This delighted him and so he decided to make the main character (the tyger), a puppet that walked in the city.

silhouete art from Lotte Reiniger

Another inspiring work were the silhouette animations from the German Lotte Reiniger. He decided to use characters created by the illustrator Samuel Casal. To animate them in flash and obtain results similar to silhouette animation, he partnered with Birdo studios. There were certainly other influences and inspirations, but these were the main ones, besides the creative process the author necessarily goes through while developing the film, which depends on his background story.

"Sapo" from Samuel Casal

Made by João Grembecki (Cia. Stromboli), Tyger is an articulated puppet that most of the time was manipulated by three people (João Grembecki, Cassiano Reis, Fábio Oliveira ). Only a few times did they use a device to move the tail. The color of the tiger was white, so that his color in the movie was defined by the color of the light on him (most of the time it's an orange tone, like the street lights).

There were several challenges regarding the manipulation of the puppet, since the people doing it were used to presenting on stage and in a film one has to pay attention to how each one enters and remains in the scene. There's a moment this attention to the positioning of the manipulators is very noticeable, when they enter the screen before the tiger does, on the top of a mountain (around 3:02).

The tiger and the manipulators were filmed in front of a green screen, and later the film and the animations were composited with the images of São Paulo.

Guilherme and Tyger
(Veja SP  - August the 2,  2006)

Something Guilherme really liked about Tyger was the freedom he had  to make it, which is usually not possible in advertisment. He commented that in some places the fact that the short doesn't have beginning, middle and end caused some surprise. Another thing that seemed unexpected for some viewers was that he didn't remove the manipulators...which would actually take away some of the charm of the short, since they are part of it.

Next post I'll write about the second part of the Masterclass, when he talked about some of his work in the advertising world. Till then!