New animated short film ‘Amazonia’

Indie director Sam Chen explains how subtle facial animation was key to successfully communicating human emotions in his solo short Amazonia, which appears in 3D World issue 137′s Short Cuts feature.

Amazonia is about two tree frogs named Bounce and Biggy who team up on a journey to find their next meal in the Amazon rainforest.

Masterful direction

Throughout the five-minute film, Chen’s masterful direction shines: “I wasn’t making a documentary,” he says. “While I wanted the shallow-focus of nature photography, I also wanted the overall look and feel to be more ‘hyper-realistic’ than photo-realistic.

“It had to be artful and fantastical. The backgrounds needed to be blown out and appear painterly and impressionistic due to the extremely shallow depth of field.”

Life-like personalities

Sam Chen’s clear vision for the film and his dedication to completing it as a sole project provides Amazonia’s characters with life-like and endearing personalities.

Read about how the director created these personalities through modelling and animating his characters to perfection in the Short Cuts section of issue 137 of 3D World magazine.

Download an exclusive excerpt from Amazonia here. (64mb)

View the trailer for Amazonia by Sam Chen.

Posted on Tuesday, November 16th, 2010 at 12:00 pm under Magazine, Shorts, Showcase. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: 3D World, Amazonia, Animation, Short Cuts