The successful creative duo Ové Pictures is coming up with a 17-minute animated film Nina, which will be their biggest project so far. After the gala premiere of the film, scheduled to take place on September 26, 2014 at the cinema Lumière, it will be distributed within the Project 100 together with Kornél Mundruczó’s Hungarian-Swedish-German live-action feature film White God, premiering on October 9, 2014.
“Our new animated film NINA is about overcoming fear. We know how it feels when fear ties up our hands, when it strangles us and won’t let us make a sound, and we also know how difficult it is to fight it. Fear is simply a part of our lives and it’s capable of creating incredible, hair-raising stories in our minds. One of those stories served as an inspiration to us, and so the tale of a timid boy Ondro—who can look at the world that surrounds him only through his binoculars—and a little woodland girl Nina—who helps him to overcome his fear—was born. However, nobody can approach Nina…” said the authors Michaela Čopíková and Veronika Obertová as they introduced their film. The narrator of the story, Ondro, is dubbed by a kid non-actor Adam Šicko. His imperfect acting performance is the source of authenticity and the moment of bringing the stylized world of animation closer to reality.
The film was made thanks to the financial support of the Slovak Audiovisual Fund, the crowdfunding platform Štartovač, and Peter Badač´s production company Bfilm – the producer of several animated projects – who decided to co-produce the film with the studio Ové Pictures.
The animated film Nina is a classic stop-motion animation, with a minimum intervention of computer post production. “We chose two types of shooting for the movie. The first one – consisting of animating our paper models on the horizontal surface – is more or less standard. However, the second one is our specialty. It consists of animating the objects on a rolling cylinder. We placed the paper models on our ‘animation’ rolling cylinder; and rotating it, we created the illusion of moving characters and landscape.”
Animated objects are in fact three-dimensional models usually folded or modeled out of paper. There are approximately 200 of them in different sizes made for the purpose of the shooting. However, even though the film is finished, the life of the paper creatures continues. After Nina’s gala premiere, the opening of the exhibition of the objects used while shooting the film will take place at the new café TUTO at Old Market Hall in Bratislava.
The making of Nina: www.vimeo.com/102711903
News about Nina: www.facebook.com/pages/Nina/1433746296899138
The studio’s webpage: www.ovepictures.com
Project 100: www.asfk.sk/projekt-100/projekt-100-2014
16. 9. 2014 / Eva Šošková
English translation by Anna Ďurišíková
