PREPRODUCTION OF SEBASTIAN THE FIDDLER, OUR BACHELOR FILM

"Sebastian the fiddler" was our bachelor film in the university. We were a team of seven animation students, and we spent 6 months to make it. I remember that we tried to do it as more professional as possible:, and we did a lot of preproduction: designs, differents armatures, reference sets. We learned how to build a good stopmotion armature and we did it! also we made some very realistic sets, with a gothic style and we could use a cool equipment of light and photo.

We had 3 important problems. First one, is that we had 6 months to do the shortfilm, and we spent 5 on the preproduction, so there was only one month to shoot seven minutes of stopmotion animation... that is crazy. The second problem was that the shortfilm needed the voice in off of the storyteller, and we never found the money to do that, so the shortfilm is finished without the voice. The third was that after we finish amazing sets, characters, we found a composer for the music, and we had a great place in the university to shoot the short with a full lighting equipment, we couldn´t use any stopmotion software (rules of the university), and we animated without the reference of the previous frame...in the "czech way", as we said then.
Finally, we could finish the shortfilm, but we had the feeling that the shortfilm would be much better if we would be able to accomplish our initial ideas... the off voice and the software issues mainly.