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Argentinian director Juan Pablo Zaramella has been making short films for a decade, but while he started as a claymation animator, his latest film is an interesting sort of “live action” claymation, in which real actors are animated frame by frame like clay figures. This form of animation, called stop-motion, is painstakingly slow, since each frame must be composed and shot separately. It seems especially difficult when working with live actors, who are not able to hold their positions the way inanimate models can.
Luminaris is the story of a man living in a world controlled and timed by light. Every morning, the inhabitants of that world are woken up and pulled to their jobs by sunlight, as if this was some sort of magnet. The main character has a routine job in a factory that makes electric light bulbs. But he has something else in mind that could change the order of things. The setting of the film is a classic Buenos Aires, revisited from a fantastic point of view. The film uses a collage of styles, combining art deco, tango, surrealism, and neorealism. This mix of influences is directly linked with the history of Buenos Aires: the city and its population themselves are a mix of different cultures.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl63luylXz8&w=560&h=315]
The film was inspired by an instrumental tango piece called “Lluvia de Estrellas” (Star Rain) composed by Osmar Maderna in the 1940s. Director Juan Pablo Zaramella explains:
I first became acquainted with this piece of music as a child, because my elders used to listen to it. I had always liked this piece but, as an adult, it gradually dawned on me that this music could be like a score of a film that had never been made. In 2008 I was granted a creativity residency by Abbaye de Fontevraud, in France. I decided to take this opportunity to develop this project. Originally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short appeared: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force.
The film took more than two years to make, mainly due to the unpredictability of weather conditions and especially the movement of the sun, which changed the shadows on the locations every day. “Both the speed and the intensity of sunlight changed during the shooting of a take, so we had to modify the time-lapse frequency and the exposure of the photographs all the time,” explains Sergio Piñeyro, director of photography.
The long months of work paid off; the film was recently named to the Oscar® shortlist for Best Animated Short Film. From this list of ten films, three to five will receive official nominations for the Academy Award® in late January.