2023-09-03 08:40:00
“Alén de la Patagonia”, the eight-episode animated series created by IUPA Toons, the animation area of the Patagonian University Institute of the Arts, by Roca, and co-produced with Paka Paka, will be released this Monday, at 3:00 p.m., by the national sign.
Alén (“clarity” in the Mapuche language) is a curious, cheerful 10-year-old girl who, together with her dog Ayún, visits her grandmother in Villa Aliwé every summer. There, Alén, her friend Beto and Ayún, of course, live funny situations exploring the nature of the place, getting to know its people, myths and legends.
The project is crossed by the ecological theme, the conservation of ancestral knowledge; In addition, it delves into the different types of ties that the character maintains in his environment. “Alén de la Patagonia” aims to entertain and educate children, young people and adults, with a regional accent and imprint, but with a universal character.
Although all these concepts were clear in the minds of its creators, its development was not going to be so simple for them. At IUPA Toons they knew that they wanted to tell a serial animated story set in Patagonia, a project that would surpass what they had produced up to now in their almost ten years of existence.
After having generated animated pieces of a few minutes, for IUPA Toons it was time to take a creative and production leap, a project with a greater volume of animation. Then Alén appeared, Patagonia and its legends. Yes, but… and?
“When we decided to do it, we thought of a kind of Patagonian Zamba, that’s how Alén’s project originally came regarding,” says Lara Decuzzi, a producer at the Production Center and at IUPA Toons and a Production teacher in the Film major. “We were developing it for a year and a half and the truth is that we didn’t hit the nail on the head with the story, with the format, it seemed to us that we were always missing something. We decided to incorporate Mariano Rojo as a scriptwriter and he solved it right away: a ten-year-old girl who visits her grandmother who knows regarding regional legends from Patagonia and who, with her friend and her dog, goes following the pranks of the legends. That’s what happens in every chapter. When the scripts appeared, everything appeared. We knew that we wanted to tell the story of this character, we wanted it to be in a serial format and we did not have the experience of working on a project with so much animation volume. From the scripts it was that everything was straightened out ”.
Until now we had not done a project as big as producing a series of eight eight-minute episodes; that is to say, with more than an hour of animation.
Lara Decuzzi, producer of “Alén de la Patagonia”
With the scripts already resolved and the story on track, the team began working on what is called the bible of the project, a folder that includes the profile of the characters, the landscapes, the animation technique to be applied, and so on. With all this, they were presented for the Platinum Industry Development Award in Animation!, at the Ventana Sur 2020 festival. With that award granted, they further developed the bible of the project and brought it closer to Paka Paka. “And Paka Paka took a trip: he proposed us to do a co-production”, sums up Decuzzi. At that time, Mariana Loterszpil joined, as a production advisor.
How “Alén de la Patagonia” was made
The animation technique used is that of 2D Cut Out, After Effect and Photoshop The first chapter has some traditional frame by frame animation scenes, but they realized that it took too much time because the cut out animation works on a puppet basis , instead the traditional animation is from each of the parts.
When IUPA Toons closed the co-production scheme with Paka Paka, it had to adjust to a strict delivery schedule for each part of the creative process that had to be respected. “So we had to enlarge the team, so we put together an internship system where we add advanced students of animation technology who later, throughout the project, graduated. The work dynamic was as follows: we had the breakdown of the number of shots that we had to film and they were distributed among five or six animators. The director, Dante Di Giovanni, received the animations and said if they were good or not, or what things needed to be corrected. But the pen had to be homogenized to say it in some way so that you work with six different animators and that difference is not noticeable. It was the work of an assembled team.”
The minimum unit in animation is the script. If in a film a casting is done to see actors, in animation that casting is the sketches of the characters. Then come the locations where the stories will take place. They are drawings that are not flat, they have perspective and a range of colors and shades.
The following is what in animation is called animatics, a kind of draft or animated story board for the development of the animation itself: if Alén walks towards the forest, how long does that walk last, to what point of the forest does he walk, and so on.
In the animatics, we also work with the soundtrack because in that character’s walk the steps have to sound like something and it will sound different if it is on water or on mud, for example. The music is also included, which in this case is original composed by… Finally, the assembly of all these elements is produced, a patient and passionate combination of technical work that is often handmade.
The voice casting deserves a separate chapter, perhaps the closest thing to a movie casting: if the actors and actresses are drawn, their voices, on the other hand, are very real and human. “Kids came from the IUPA drama career and from the locution orientation of the UNC Social Communication career, in fact, Abril Lagos, whose voice is the voice of Alén, is a graduate of that career,” he reveals. Decuzzi.
With the script resolved, the voice casting began under the direction of Ricardo Peinado. Di Giovani explained to the applicants what the physical expression of animation was like and Peinado helped them with acting tools to improve oral expression and give the voices a particular color, nuance and speed for each character, which is not always they were human. For example, it was necessary to put voices to two snakes, one of land and the other of water, for which both interpreters had to find the right tone for these very particular characters.
IUPA Toones: the new challenges
Lara Decuzzi, with extensive experience in regional audiovisual production, takes stock of “Alén de la Patagonia” and does not hesitate to point out that “it has international standards, very mainstream, it might be programmed on any animation signal and it has a volume of animation that it’s great. Any animated film that lasts an hour or an hour and a half has the same production period that we had with Alen”.
He also highlighted the construction of a solid production team with its own resources that also value the training part. “You are training to do this here. The union between training and production is very important”.
“We are already working on an Alen short film format because we realized that we can make a more developed animation, more playable.”
Lara Decuzzi, producer at IUPA Toons.
Decuzzi recalls that during the long production process of the series they went from being overexcited at the beginning to wondering if what they were doing was really good and now, three years following those uncertainties typical of being embarked on a project as big as it was unprecedented, seeing it finished and knowing that it is good “we feel enormous satisfaction. Expanding the team of animators, training interns, turning around the animation technique… there is satisfaction in the quality of what is obtained. Having finished it is not little.”
And now? “We are already working on a short film format for Alen because we realized that we can make a more developed animation, more played. We are already working on a short film that allows us to delve into some other things in the story. What is coming is the short film of Alén in Patagonia.
Technical sheet of «Alén de la Patagonia
Cast (voices):
Beyond: April Lakes
Beto: Fernanda Pincheira
Grandma Carmen: Lina Destéfanis
Train Train: Dario Di Meglio
Kai Kai: Tulio Hajos
Machi: Karina Acosta
Forest ranger: Ricardo DiGiovanni
Technical team
Address: Dante DiGiovanni
Script: Marian Red
Production: Lara Decuzzi and
Nicholas Martinez
Advice and tutoring: Mariana Loterszpil
Story board: Ezequiel Ziaurriz Culla and Sergio Paci
Animatic: Matthias Tondato and
Camila Gonzalez
Character design: Ezequiel Ziaurriz Culla, Dante Di Giovanni, Paula Sanchez, Sergio Paci
Art direction: Victoria Lopez Gargiulo.
Stage design: Victoria Lopez Gargiulo and Sergio Paci
Rigging: Dante DiGiovanni
cutout animation: Dante Di Giovanni, Matthias Olate, Gio Mazziotti, Mercedes Avila, Micaela Bargiggia, Sofia Peinetti solo cap
Traditional animation: Ezequiel Ziaurriz Culla
Traditional Animation Assistance: Agustina Roa
Lip sync: Federico Videla
Design and motion graphics: Sergio Paci
Sound Design and Foley: Matias Tondato
Direction of actors: Ricardo Peinado, Dante Di Giovanni and Matías Tondato
Original music: Marcos Joubert
Musicians: Roberto García (guitars), Pablo Joubert (bass), Marcos Joubert (drums)
What is IUPA Toons?
IUPA Toons is the animation area of the Patagonian University Institute of the Arts that works in General Roca, Río Negro. It was established as a space for experimentation, training and generation of high-quality content related to digital animation techniques and new narratives. It is made up of teachers and advanced students and graduates. Its objective is to produce original content for various media as well as to generate a project incubator.
IUPA Toons was created in 2013 as an extension project of lUPA with some graduates who were interested in exploring regional animation, even before the Animation Technology career was opened. Thus the team grew along with the productions made: two series for Pinturerías El Dante, Pintino and Pintacho; Chaos & Mishap; buses Lua at night; short film Happy Ending; Art and Technology micros for TEC TV; short series Pintino and his friends.
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