Online catalogue

Step by step, from the very beginning. From creating a recording in the field to submitting the final mix to cinemas. In his lecture, Juraj Mravec will talk about his profession of sound engineer for television and film, describe his journey through the film industry and explain the basic principles and methods used while creating sound for film and television. The lecture will include practical sound and film examples and samples. 

This section presents 10 short animated projects in development.

During the presentation, the project teams will have 5 minutes to pitch their films to a jury of three senior executives and to the general professional audience.

Head of the section: Aneta Ozorek (Poland)

Jury members: Wendy Griffiths (Dark Prince, France), Karten Matern (Balance Film, Germany) and Anna Zača (Latvian Animation Association, Riga International Film Festival, Latvia).

This section presents 9 animated TV projects in development.

During the presentation, the project teams will have 7 minutes to pitch their films to a jury of three senior executives and to the general professional audience.

Head of the section: Martina Peštaj (Slovenia)

Jury members: Stefan Pfäffle (KiKA – Kinderkanal ARD/ZDF, Germany), Michaela Sabolčáková (Radio and Television of Slovakia), Nils Stokke (Sparkmedia, Norway).

Animation is used almost everywhere. We’re not talking just about films, but also series for children, commercials, games and augmented and virtual reality. There are many animation techniques from puppets through cutout to 2D and 3D animation, so it’s not just about working on a computer but also about using your own hands. The production of an animated feature film takes several years and there are hundreds of people of various professions involved – screenwriters and animators who bring characters to life, designers and illustrators who create fantastic worlds, programmers who develop tools, 3D graphics and many more.

This section presents 7 animated feature films.

During the presentation, the project teams will have 7 minutes to pitch their films to a jury of three senior executives and to the general professional audience.

Head of the section: Aneta Ozorek (Poland)

Jury members: Annemie Degryse (Lunanime/Lumiere, Belgium), Jakub Karwowski (Letko, Poland), Esben Toft Jakobsen (animation director, Denmark).

This year, the XR section will be presented for the first time as part of the competition at CEE Animation Forum. The section presents 3 XR projects.

During the presentation, the project teams will have 5 minutes to pitch their films to a jury of three senior executives and to the general professional audience.

Jury members: Manu Weiss (immersive media artist, Switzerland), Milivoj Popović (Prime Render Studios, Croatia), Veljko Popović (Prime Render Studios, Croatia).

During his career, sound engineer Juraj Mravec has worked on 50 feature films and 50 series. Since 2011, he has been working for prominent sound studio Boompost based in London. Juraj Mravec won the BAFTA Award for his work on the historical Netflix series The Crown and a Czech Lion for Kooky. Juraj will use Kooky to share his experiences from working on sound of animated films and will focus on specific elements characterising work for animated films.  

Authors of animated films are used to creating various fictional worlds in which they don’t stick to the rules and customs of the real world and instead come up with an order and universe of their own, based solely on their decisions and imagination. It is most noticeable in the visuals of the films through visual metaphors, blending and manipulation with space and characters. A similar approach, not bound by reality, can be found in sound as authors/sound engineers often like to use original means of expression – including the most accessible of them all, the human mouth. The result of this unusual addition of sound to animation can be a fascinating vocal soundscape imbuing moving pictures with specific appeal, humour as well as melancholy and mysteriousness.

New Cinema 2020–2021 is an educational project for cinema owners divided into several parts. The first part includes seminars for 10 participants who take part in activities at selected film festivals (Liberec, Zlín, Jihlava). The second part consists of presentations in cinemas for up to 30 cinema owners where the operation of cinemas is presented. The third part finishes with conferences where the main information from the respective festival is presented. Seminars focus on work with a specific type of film and are concluded by a public presentation organised as a part of the industry programme. The presentations are given by cinema owners, distributors and producers. Their aim is to introduce various views on the work with specific films and their viewers to the professional public.

The fifth annual edition of our get-together with beer for all fans of animation, animators, aspiring authors and random passers-by moves from Artrafika to Liberec.

The programme traditionally includes a showcase of various animations from dozens of Czech authors and the thematic competition section GIF Competition.

Each author has four minutes to fill with an audiovisual content of their choice.

Just because you can’t code doesn’t mean you can’t make your own game or work in a game development studio! This lecture will introduce the basic structure of a gaming company and show you various ways to make your own game without knowing how to code. Just don’t be afraid!

Foley Studio BEEP is an interactive space where visitors to Anifilm can see what it takes to be a Foley artist. Sound engineer Kryštof Blabla and Foley artist Andrea Veselková will walk them through the production process, explain the principles of Foley artistry and show them how sounds are reproduced. Every visitor will have the chance to try adding sounds to a selected scene from Deep in Moss by Filip Pošivač and Barbora Valecká.

They will not. Not even artificial intelligence has become so intelligent as to animate a whole film by itself. But some recent technologies could help the artists and save a lot of time with animation lightboxes or tablets. One of these new inventions is EbSynth. Our lecture will introduce this technology and we will talk about its potential for classical animation and VFX. We will see behind-the-scenes tests of two projects in development and look for inspiration for new films as we would very much like to see something other than plastic 3D in cinemas.

Everything is permitted in a complex electroacoustic composition made up of sounds of instruments mixed with sounds captured from the real world, electronic processing and sampling of all kinds, sounds of voices and resonant bodies, but always at the exclusive service of the film.

In the masterclass, Andrea Martignoni will talk about his own experience in the field, about his collaboration with street artist Blu and with plenty of important artists-animators all over the world, showing and talking about the films he has worked on as well as some other animations that touched him deeply thanks to the use of sound.

At the ceremony, the winners of the official pitching competition categories: shorts, TV series/specials, features and XR will be announced and each will be awarded the amount of EUR 1,000. In addition, other award categories will be presented, such as the Audience award (EUR 1,000) and corporate partner awards: free scholarships to trainings (Animation Sans Frontières, CEE Animation Workshop), market and pitching events (Animarkt, Kids Kino.Lab) and others.

Come and see games competing in Anifilm’s International Competition of Computer Games. Martin Vaňo will introduce fifteen titles which he chose together with Jakub Dvorský and Pavel Dobrovský. Criteria for the selection included not only the games’ artistic design, but also gameplay. An international jury composed of Marta Fijak, Rafael Verona and Marek Plichta will pick winners in two categories – Visual Art and Games for Children. There are also four Czech projects competing.

As the new generation of Czech animators establishes itself more and more and finds increasing success on an international level, it is only natural that a group is forming of collaborators playing various roles in the creative process. In the case of sound and music – essential elements of animated films – ties to specific authors are stronger than with other film forms. A successful animated film often has an excellent soundtrack (sometimes, unfortunately, somewhat overshadowed). This debate with contemporary sound engineers and music composers with varied experience will delve into this overlooked topic.

animation-inspiration

This event which regularly takes place in Prague will introduce three speakers from the fields of animation, graphic design and visual art. In three twenty-minute slots, they will show you what inspires them, where they get their ideas and where they turn if they run out of them.

You will see animator, graphic designer and co-founder of Sós Magdalena Hejlzarová, animator, graphic designer and gastronomy guru Bára Halířová, and motion designer and co-founder of the Mouvo conference Jan Netušil.

Visual effects (VFX) have become an inseparable part of not only high-budget epic films but also of most independent projects, commercials, TV shows and games. All destructions and deformations, waves, liquids, explosions and simulations of dust, fire, smoke, clothing and hair – that’s VFX. VFX are imagination. The development of visual effects makes big strides forward and technologies keep getting better and more interesting.

There is nothing creative in downloading music and ready-made sounds and hiring actors or sound engineers. Young people trying animation for the first time need something different. The team headed by Pavel Trnka (an artist and teacher from Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic) has spent sixteen years focusing on developing a wider range of talent. The beginners participate in scripting, voice acting, post-synchronization and music. The sound component of film is often the best way to diversify the courses. The technique of post-synchronization in a small recording studio enables intensive work with drama and gives opportunities to gifted children to try directing and acting.

In recent years some exciting works have been published that combine elements of both video games and comics. In this session we will take a closer look at the game Florence and analyse in detail how it utilises the strengths of illustrations, animation and simple interactivity to tell its story in a unique way.

Ové Pictures, established in 2010 in Bratislava, is formed by Slovak filmmakers Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová. Together, they work on various projects, TV series, commercials and animations for musical and other cultural events. They use mainly traditional animation techniques – drawing, stop-motion and cutout animation. They have won many awards at home as well as abroad and presented their interactive exhibition Searching for Beauty and project HUGs in many cities across Europe.

In line with this year’s theme, we will focus on renowned Czech composers who worked on various Czechoslovak animated films. We will explore the remarkable diversity and specificity of the music composed by these masters. And it’s safe to say that their means of expression which we will examine are even more varied than the sounds of live-action films! You can look forward to many previews, samples and extracts and there’s a good chance that you will hear a few notes played on the piano by lecturer (musical scientist) Kuba Vlček.

Serge Besset is going to take you on a journey of composing for films. Not only mentioning his experiences as a composer, including composition, orchestration and recording, he also will discuss his relationships with the directors of the films. How music can be sly and change the meaning of the film!

Serge Besset is a French music composer, particularly known for his soundtracks for animated films. Since 1980 he has composed more than 400 original soundtracks. He has received multiple awards for his work on Phantom Boy (2015, dir. Jean-Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol), Aunt Hilda! (2013, dir. Benoît Chieux, Jacques-Rémy Girerd), A Cat in Paris (2010, dir. Jean-Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol) and The Monk and the Fish (1994, dir. Michael Dudok de Wit), among others.

During one hour and a half, Luce Grosjean will present different keys to success when it comes to distributing animated short films and opening up new opportunities for short-film screenings. From her experience with successful films such as Bloeistraat 11 (2018, dir. Nienke Deutz), Egg (2018, dir. Martina Scarpelli) or Negative Space (2017, dir. Max Porter, Ru Kuwahata) – all of which you could have seen at Anifilm – she will establish an overview of the different ways to promote short films. What are the real possibilities of internet, where is the money for the distribution coming from? From looking at different case scenarios we will see how there is not only one path for animated short film distribution, and that there are also new ones to be explored.

In our gaming session with authors, you will have a chance to see three independent Czech games and their authors who will tell you something about their work while playing it. The first game is the dystopian Ministry of Broadcast developed by a Czech studio of the same name. The second is the fairy-tale adventure Pilgrims by Amanita Design and the third is Creaks, also by Amanita Design, who have had a very fruitful year this year.

When The Simpsons was made into a prime time series, David Silverman became a director and later a producer. David, the director of Monsters, Inc. and The Simpsons Movie, will talk about his career, starting at the very beginning. He will discuss such aspects as his development as a cartoonist and those who influenced him. Then he will talk about his freelance work leading up to The Simpsons, presenting examples along the way. Then we will have a discussion of the early development of The Simpsons, and, if time, other work he has done.

music. Anticipation and fadeout – two principles of using music in films. Is it necessary to provide every visual with sound? Musical and film silence. The basics of acoustics, how to modify your home studio. Additive principle, sound tracks. Musical detail. Illustration or magic (diegesis – mimesis). What do you need? Look around you: possibilities of recording improvised instruments (body sounds, breath, whistling, mouth-play, kitchenware, toys, cans, iron, pumpkins, knives etc.). Simple tricks for playing instruments you can’t play. Other modifications on a PC.

How to evaluate the outcome?

When I began in film, the concept of ‘sound design’ was new. For my first animated film, with the Brothers Quay, we began by asking: “How do you make a soundtrack?” So we thought about the films we had in common – Eraserhead, Stalker, the works of Jan Švankmajer and Len Lye, as well as less erudite references like Roadrunner, American TV and baseball. Since then, I feel the best way to start a soundtrack is as though I’ve never done it before, with no expectations and no preconceptions.

In this talk I’ll reflect on how I think about, and teach, sound.

Heavily realistic deep fake viral videos with Hollywood stars or Miloš Zeman made him popular all over the world. Now, their author, known by his nickname Ctrl Shift Face, will personally give the Liberec audiences an idea of how this controversial transformation of reality is done. During a hosted session, there will surely be time for technological questions and many examples. With regards to the fact that we live in times of fake news and disinformation, we will also focus on the ethical level of fake videos. For more information please visit: https://www.youtube.com/c/CtrlShiftFace

Systems are a unique aspect of games as a medium, as they are solely responsible for interaction. So let's talk about them, let's discuss whether they are only there for engagement, or whether those systems are also a part of the broadly understood narration in the medium. And if systems are a narrative tool, let's discuss whether players are ready to read them as such because Will Wright said himself that The Sims is a parody and a commentary on the consumer lifestyle.

As is the tradition, Jakub Dvorský, founder of the Czech indie game developing studio Amanita Design, will introduce the most beautiful and interesting indie games from the past year.