Wellington animation team Truba talk us through their VF48Hours superhero movie, Infinite Origin.
Truba might be the most international team in this year’s Vista Foundation 48 Hours. An actual animation studio outside of the competition (they’ve produced animations for [adult swim] and made music videos for Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Childish Gambino), its members were spread across three different countries this year.
Director / lead animator Greg Sharp and and co-producer Nina Knežević worked from Serbia, other animation and music was done in Melbourne and sound design and voice acting in Wellington. Co-producer Rowan Sharp ran things from the Wellington end, and says this time-zone spread was by design: “Since animation is so laborious, it’s vital to use every minute.”
The result is Infinite Origin, an animation that looks like it took a lot longer than a single weekend to make. That’s the magic of 48Hours!
This film is about…
It’s a one-liner violent slapstick cartoon about body-swapping techno vikings from space in their ageless battle through infinity, which leans pretty heavy on the Saturday morning cartoon tropes and goes for super fast pacing. Think Fallen (1998) meets Tom & Jerry.
The biggest challenge we faced…
The bottleneck was the storyboarding process. The story itself came together really easily in an hour or so, but the window for thumbnailing was relatively small, as the actors needed to record dialogue so the animatic could be locked and chopped into shots so the animators could begin animating. So the storyboard had to be finished super fast, which meant it came out as illegible scribbles, but we had to proceed.
The physical and emotional toll of the weekend…
At one point Nina fell down some stairs holding a glass bottle and required stitches. Greg is 40 and all-nighters are starting to take their toll. For me it was just the uncertainty that we would reach the finish line – it was concerning to wake up on Sunday morning (NZ time) to see very little of the shots had been completed.
Our top 48Hours tips…
Prep as much as you can before the weekend, always get signed release forms from your cast early (ideally Friday night), set a time for the brainstorming session to end, feed and caffeinate your crew well, watch your film from beginning to end before handing it in, and finally, go for a nervous pee before the Wellington city manager starts their livestream calls because you might just be called first.
The VF48Hours 2021 Grand Final is on May 22 in Auckland. For more information visit 48hours.co.nz