The story focuses on a seamstress who awaits the return of her love who is fighting in the war, upon his return however, she sees him badly wounded and quickly attempts to mend him by stitching up his body. Seeing that her technique apparently works, the seamstress eagerly heads out with her husband in hopes of helping others that are suffering in the aftermath of the war, setting off to mend destroyed homes, bridges and fields. Sadly however, the seamstress does not notice her husband as he slowly transforms into a monster, apparently so focused on helping the rest of the world, until it is too late...
When I had first watched this, I believed that the message behind it was: "It is naive of one to think it is so easy to repair the world and make things right, the truth is that it is not at all that easy."
While the seamstress tries to bring the world back to working order after the war, she is naive to think that she could do so by merely repairing all the physical damage caused from the war and not at all considering the mental scars inflicted on such people like her husband. She especially never notices the turmoil her husband faces until it is too late, perhaps not even being able to recognize the scarred creature he turns into at the end as everything she worked so hard to fix is destroyed in seconds.
The seamstress and the soldier represent two sides of our fragile humanity, the seamstress represents naive hope and optimism (Which of course is not a bad thing), while the soldier, having experienced war, is a shell of his former self and represents harsh reality.
I really liked the simple yet still expressive character designs, they contrasted well with the incredibly intricate backgrounds (There are so much details and textures used for them) used for the short, the cute look of the characters at first set off a very optimistic tone for the story until one of them begin warping into something twisted and monstrous in appearance while destroying everything it possibly once held dear to it.
I also liked the details that were put into creating an authentic, vintage looking setting, with the warm color palette used and the bit of graininess added in to create that old film effect, and of course the style of music itself. And then there are of course the costume designs, the seamstress' clothing resembles that of a flapper, a type of fashion that started after the end of World War I
Like all 2D animations these days (And like the previous student works shared), frames were drawn by hand, then cleaned up and colored digitally. A lot (And I mean a lot) of planning was done before all of this though, and supposedly more traditional mediums were used when working on the concepts especially when experimenting for an effective style for the final product.
Unlike the previous school animations I shared with you all, this one was created by a team of students, for the animation and music and sound design. So it will be a little tough focusing on them individually for this post. It just goes to show you however a team effort is required when creating a quality animation from scratch.
I am sure they separated into several groups to work in separate areas to allow progression to go more smoothly and efficiently, such as conceptual art development, storyboarding, composition planning, frame by frame line drawing, clean ups and full renderings, background painting, and finally animation testing. We also cannot forget those that helped with the music and sounds.
A "Making of" video was also posted of the short so have a look see:
There are some other interesting discussions going on this website:
http://www.thesteampunkempire.com/video/trois-petits-points-hd-magnificent-animated-film-by-l-andreae?id=2442691%3AVideo%3A1437310&page=1#comments
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