In his ambitious new passion project, Uruguay-based Brazilian director/animator Chico Jofilsan employs multiple techniques to tackle one of the central dilemmas facing all creatives, “How to choose one idea from among so many?”
Chico Jofilsan: “I’ve been wanting to do a personal project for a long time. A project where I could have total creative control. As life goes on you get stuck into your daily routine between family and paying the bills and a personal project is always a challenger.
I had four or five incomplete scripts for different short films and I was trying to figure which one I should move on with. It would be impossible to plan a production schedule since the film would have to be done in my free time between client jobs.
“And of course I would have to face the problem of losing interest in doing something that potentially would have to be on pause for up to six months multiple times.
“With that in mind, I decided to go with this script that allows for multiple styles and techniques. I’m passionate about too many things so mixed media would help me with my constant quest for different techniques and styles.
“So every time I was in between jobs I would tackle one scene. I thought this process would be a clever way of not losing interest in the long run.
“It felt good at the beginning but after a while, I realized that every time I came back to my film, I would have to start up from scratch. Most of the scenes do not appear more than once and there’s no color pallet or art direction styles that would be predefined.
“It ended up being more work than a regular film that keeps that same visual language, characters, and style. It was like a Self-taught masterclass and also a way of measuring the production time frame of different styles for future projects.
“It took me two years from writing the script to having the film almost done. Almost because now I had to find someone who would embrace this crazy idea and work on the music.
“I was very lucky to team up with Antfood. They had a very difficult challenge of creating music that should change constantly and sometimes between really short scenes. They did it so well and so smoothly that the music ties it all together.”
Director/animator: Chico Jofilsan
Script: Chico Jofilsan, Duda Fonseca
Editing/proofreading: Laura Zuñiga
Live action support/actors: Duda Fonseca, Lucía Yáñez, Micaela Cantaro, Pablo Yáñez
Music/sound design: Antfood
Voice actor: Chris Gibbs