"One Minute Puberty", "Maniman"
Channel: Stash Magazine
Date: 2014-05-06

The original films, music videos and motion design you see on STASH, took a long time to produce by some of the world's top creative minds. Show your appreciation to them, by "liking" it and sharing it on your social networks. Thanks!  Stay in touch and subscribe at http://www.youtube.com/stashcreative

Short Films 1:41, 1:43
Director: ALEXANDER GELLNER
Animation: ALEXANDER GELLNER http://www.bitteschoen.tv

Alexander Gellner, director/animator in Berlin: "I created these films as a part of a larger project called 'The animated life of John Jay Marathon' which will include one film for each of ten different themes such as birth, youth, love, work, the elderly or death. The films are all very different in style and content, as they are a project for me to try out things I have not done before: to achieve experience in building good stories and then finding the fitting means to tell each story.

"In 'Puberty' the biggest challenge was to make a concise flowing narration out of many different raw themes and ideas. The first storyboard was much more wild and overwhelming, the finished film has a certain rhythm with pauses and wild parts working together. 

"I used plain frame-by-frame animation in a style I was comfortable with. Flash is not the best tool for frame-by-frame, but I couldn't get the same quality line in TVPaint, so I fought through it. I spent about about seven weeks total spread between freelance jobs.

"In my work as a freelancer I have been doing a lot of limited animation and a lot of quick and dirty jobs due to time and budget constraints. Nothing wrong with cutting some corners and finding solutions within tight restrictions. But I was growing more and more aware of the divide between what I really liked, proper animation and good story, and what I made most of the day. I was jealous of those film school kids that could work on a two-minute chase scene for a year, have it screened on Annecy and then go on to work for a good company. 

"With 'One Minute Puberty' I made no compromises and worked on it until I could not do it any better. I am happy that my decision to put that much effort into a personal project was met with the approval of such a large community and many people I admire dearly.

"The second film, 'Maniman,' explores the theme of aging and death from a childlike point of view, giving it the most distant and natural touch possible. How does narration effect memories of past events and melt with the event again to alter the narration?

"The biggest challenge on this film was finding the middle ground between abstraction and keeping the drawings readable. The drawing should reflect the uncertainty of a story told from memory and the special character of a curious old man. So there is a lot of wiggly line work and awkward intersections and compositions that I wouldn't normally do but ultimately added the special allure it has now. I had keyframes for every scene and could animate straight from key to key. I spent one day for design and voice work, then ten days animating using TVPaint and After Effects for the compositing. 
Director/animator: Alexander Gellner Maniman writer, voice: Roland Brückner Maniman illustrations: Roland Brückner Sound design/music: Niklas A Kröger

Toolkit Flash, After Effects



Follow us on: Google+:   http://gplus.to/StashCreative

And our affiliate social networks:
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/foliosweep
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/foliosweep