Feb 19, 2014

Feral": The Art of the Academy Award Nominated Short Film

In a special Cartoon Brew series, we asked five films nominated for the 2013 Academy Award for Best Animated Short to talk about their work. Today, we begin with an exclusive interview with the short contenders from the independent film "Feral," directed by Daniel Sousa.

(Click on image to enlarge) See artwork from other 2013 Oscar nominated animated shorts: Possessions, Mr. Hublot, Get A Horse! Daniel Sousa: "Initially, the film was going to be about Caspar Hauser, a boy who was locked in a dark room from his early childhood and had no contact with people. He escaped as a teenager and was found in the center of town with a mysterious letter: "I want to be a horseman like my father. Fascinated by the riddle, the first few designs became illustrations of the story. These are simple watercolor studies."

Daniel Souza "The boy is a hollow vessel of information, immersed in the chaos of a newly discovered civilization, allowing it to flow through him.

Daniel Souza "As my research on the subject progressed, I gradually moved away from the specific narrative of Kaspar Hauser and began to explore only the idea of an isolated child, trapped in his own mind, naked and fragile. This is a look test, painted in acrylic paint on board.

Daniel Souza: "I began to feel that the boy had to be more savage, untamed, aggressive. So I tried a very loose painterly approach, making the brush strokes more expressive and removing the facial features. The lack of facial features made the boy seem more mysterious, more like a blank slate with no personality. He seemed ghostly and more animalistic. We didn't know what he was thinking, and that was important to the story."

Daniel Souza: "Following this idea, I began to create the world around the boy, using rough shapes and silhouettes, blocks of shadow and light. Finally, I began to feel that I was able to express the "corpse" and the "body" that the story demanded of me. At this stage, the character of the hunter was not yet fully developed, so here he is portrayed as a fisherman or a farmer."[13

Daniel Souza: "I used strong contrasts of light and shadow, keeping to a harmonious spectrum of earth colors while reducing the extreme saturation. The world around the boy needed to feel cold and oppressive, so the saturated color space no longer made sense. Here the man is still a fisherman, holding a net, but his appearance is already close to the final version. The streetscape is taken from memory of Lisbon, a patchwork of shingled roofs and stucco walls.