HDFEST Digital Animation Articles

Interview 1, March 2007

HDFEST interviews Lola and Bek creators of Bibi, Click here to watch the trailer for Lola and Bek's short HD animation, Bibi

HDFEST: What was your initial inspiration that was behind the creation of Bibi?

Lola & Bek: We had couple of ideas from the beginning. Bek and I were constantly discussing the characters, trying to settle on one of them.
But one day, We had a friend visiting our place with his little daughter. This little girl was so energetic that in about half and hour she turned our place upside down: getting locked in a bathroom, disconnecting network cables of our PCs, hiding our shoes and using kitchen pots for drums. We instantly fell in love with her! She was so curious and so full of life that we ditched all other characters and used her character for Bibi.

HDFEST: How did using HD change your workflow?

L&B: Primarily we chose HD due to its crisp resolution and versatility. Once rendered in HD, one can really convert the work in one step to 35mm film or to tape. We paid a lot more attention to details while creating Bibi, and were able to express ourselves in more artistic way, something rendering in HD made it possible.

HDFEST: Have you found creating an animation with HD resolution has opened up new doorways for you as an animator?

L&B: Bibi participated so far in more than 40 film festivals worldwide. By far the best experience screening of Bibi we had was in Japan: in Tokyo and in Sapporo. The screenings in film festivals in Japan by far had the best equipment to fully utilize the potentials of HD. When you're screening your film on wide screen before the audience, you want your work to excite the audience, as much as it excites you. Rendering our work in HD made this possible for us. We realized that we didn't go wrong when we decided to go with HD format. Our next definitely will in HD, no doubt about it.

HDFEST: What do you think is currently holding more animators back from rendering in HD resolution?

L&B: Based on our experience, a lot more film festivals are really trying to screen movies in HD, they're really trying hard. But unfortunately the equipment they have is outdated. Even if their application says that they have HD equipment, at the end the go with Beta-SP when screening. Everything boils down to resources they have at their disposal and ability to use them effectively. But we're noticing that festivals are really turning around and overhauling their equipment to support HD screenings. I'd say to animators definitely go with HD rendering, not only due to its crisp display, but also it's versatility: you can always go to a less resolution VHS from high resolution HD, but not the other way round.

The second reason is animators may be holding back from using HD is because of lack of storage space HD occupies. Once you start rendering in HD, your work will start consuming gigabytes of data. And of course you want to try out different resolutions, different shots, angles and etc. This will easily add up to tens of gigabytes (depending on your film may be even hundreds). Besides, you may want to backup your data, have several version of it handy, thus tripling the amount of space consumed. But we're seeing technology evolving with terabyte-size disks and NAS storage coming up for home use, and hopefully the issue with storage space will be remedied.

HDFEST: What new software or programs are you looking forward to seeing in the world of animation?

L&B: There is so much software out there, all of them very capable to achieve the state of art for your work. What is very important is that there is a tendency between software makers to integrate and interoperate their piece of software with another. So, knowing one piece of software will carry you onto learning another software making transition smooth. What is most challenging for software makers right now is to make software less challenging technically, but letting you focus on artistic part of creative process so you get the job done. Are we looking for a new piece of software? Well, Bibi was done entirely using Maya and we used Adobe After Effecting for composing. I think we're still learning both pieces of software because they're very powerful and have almost endless capabilities. I think it is important for us to obtain even deeper knowledge of existing software we're using instead of focusing on new ones.

HDFEST: What are you currently working on and where can people go to see more of your work?

Being a small boutique studio we're more focusing on commercial advertising, broadcast design and commercial spots. This pays for bread and butter and leaves us an opportunity to develop our next independent project. We have several ideas and projects in mind and playing with it on and off between service work we do. But yet again everything boils down to time and financial footing to sponsor the project.

HDFEST: Thank you both and good luck with the next project!