La Nostalgia del Sr. Alambre
This is one of the prettiest pieces that I’ve ever worked on! Animator extraordinaire Jonathan Ostos Yaber combines stop motion animation with CG and matte paintings to bring to life the story of a Puppet Artist who chases his dream all the way to the big city, leaving behind what he loves for what he desires most.
There is a specific discipline when working with images that are already both vibrant and exceptional, quite often the case with stop motion and CG. The very richness of the images can also be the problem, and focussing the attention of the audience becomes the main task. For Sr. Alambre, I used many soft vignettes to create some ‘spot lighting’, and also blurs the foreground and the edges in some shots to simulate shallower depth of field.
As beautiful as these three images were to begin with, they all had their challenges. The first one felt flat and looked like a night scene lit up by a tungsten moon! I simulated some mixed lighting by pushing some blue in the shadows around the characters, but kept their skin tones warm to indicate the light reflecting off the canvas. Some soft vignetting also helps focus the eye. The second image is much more surreal, and therefore I augmented much of the pastel colours with some saturation in the mid tones while retaining cleaner highlights. The third image is all about drama, and shows an example of selective blurring to simulate a shallower depth of field. I also isolated Sr. Alambre using some qualifiers to lift him from the background, and snapped the contrast to create an almost Hi Con look.
Sr. Alambre is one of those shorts that’s a real labour of love. The thought and effort that’s gone into it is evident, and the story is relatable to any artist who’s struggling to make it big. It’s been an Official Selection in so many festivals the filmmakers have lost count!
Check out the gallery for more stills from the movie, or watch this festival darling in its entirety on Vimeo.
Milton Adamou 