At the end of last month he landed on Netflix the third installment of ‘Love, Death + Robots’, the animation anthology with which its creators are given a wide berth to explore the field of science fiction. One of the most impressive shorts of this third season was ‘jibaro’from the Spanish director Alberto Mielgoand since Geeked Week we’ve been given a better look at how it was built.
Mermaids, Knights + Heart-stopping Visuals
Alberto Mielgo gave us tremendous joy when he got the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film for ‘The wiper’, so we really wanted to see what he brought us with his new participation in ‘Love, Death + Robots’. The director had already left us the short film ‘The Witness’ in the first season of the anthology, and despite having such a high bar ‘Jíbaro’ also became the perfect finishing touch for the third and also one of the most powerful.
So thanks to a video from Netflix’s ‘Inside Animation’, we’ve been able to see a little more of the creative process until it came to our screens with Mielgo himself explaining the development of his short.
“I think that if you want to do animation for adults, you have to be brave, do extreme things. ‘Jíbaro’ is a brutal disaster,” Mielgo can be heard in the Netflix video. “The first thing I wanted to do is a story without heroes or good characters… just a tragedy. I wanted to talk about the most toxic relationship you can imagine.”
In the Netflix video you can see how the animation was made, from the first modeling and animation tests, and by the different states through which each plane passed. They not only used references for the characters, they also looked for real scenarios in which they were inspired for the setting of the short and achieve that combination between realism and fantasy.
“The animation looks so rich and real because it’s actually recorded with real characters,” explains the Spanish director about the animation process. “In my films we work with actors to be able to see their emotions, to record the performance on their faces, and obviously the mechanics of their bodies.”
“The intensive work you have to do to be able to create just 15 minutes of animation is crazy. We were 72 people and everything is done from scratch. You have to design it, model it, make the skeleton… It’s an incredible amount of work. > >