2001 Oscar winning film “Father and Daughter” from Michael Dudok de Wit. Michael’s previous films have included the much acclaimed “The Monk and the Fish” (Oscar nominated) which was painted, traced and shot traditionally on a rostrum camera.
Spider Eye was very keen to work with a director of Michael’s stature and introduce him to the greater inherent flexibility of working digitally.
Father and Daughters’ attention to detail and subtle techniques proved difficult to achieve and would have been impossible to create traditionally. The principal difficulty lay in Michael’s desire to avoid the flat painted feel of cel painting, seeking instead to fill areas with carefully coloured, boiling textures. Michael supplied Spider Eye with a series of tiffs of coloured, grainy textured swatches created in Photoshop. These tiffs were then loaded into the network at Spider Eye and short film clips made by animating the tiffs. Once these boiling textues had been rendered back to disc at suitably high resolution they were imported into composite scenes and attatched to the character animation via travelling mattes.
As many as a dozen matte runs and textures were needed per character. The weight of the grain of the textures was carefully considered, they were scaled to the character at the start of each scene and keyframes for scale added to the animation timeline, these were then used to animate the textures’ scale in relation to the animation. The backgrounds were painted by hand and touched up in photoshop then suplied to Spider Eye as tiffs. All elements were then composited in Animo, including camera moves, multiplane effects, cross dissolves and grading.
The finished production was output by Spider Eye at high resolution and transferred to film for a premiere at the Ottawa film festival in september 2000 where it received two awards: The Peoples’ Choice and the Independent film award.
Subsequently it has won:
Academy Award (Oscar) 2001 – USA
British Academy Award (BAFTA) 2001 – England
Grand Prix – Annecy International Animation Festival 2001
Audience Prize – Annecy International Animation Festival 2001
British Animation Awards 2002 – Craft Award
British Animation Awards 2002 – Best Scenario Award
British Animation Awards 2002 – Best Short Film
Grand Prix – Cinanima 2000, Portugal
Press Prize (Prize Alves Costa) – Cinanima 2000, Portugal
Public Prize – Ottawa International Animation Festival 2000, Canada
First Prize – Ottawa International Animation Festival 2000, Canada
Grand Prix – Holland Animation Film Festival 2000
Best Animation Film – Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival 2001, France
Most Inspirational Short Film – Reel to Real 2001, Canada (voted by the Youth Jury)
Special Jury Prize: Best short film – Montreal International Children Film Festival 2001, Canada
People’s Choice Award: Best short film – Montreal International Children Film Festival 2001, Canada
2nd Prize/Animation in the International Competition – Filmfest Dresden 2001, Germany
Prize of the Youth Jury, the Youth Oscar/Animation – Filmfest Dresden 2001, Germany
Special Mention – Cracow Film Festival 2001
Best short film – Rushes Soho Film Festival 2001
And many more!
Director: Michael Dudok de Wit
Client: Cloudrunner
Date: 2000