BATON ROUGE – The Red Stick International Animation Festival announces the finalists for its 2008 Best of the Fest Awards. The winners will be announced on the last day of the festival, Saturday, April 19, at 10 a.m. in the Manship Theatre.
Red Stick, which will take place April 16-19 in downtown Baton Rouge’s Arts District, received 207 films from 27 countries for this year’s animation competition. The festival accepted entries from Aug. 1 through Dec. 17. The festival will award work in the following categories:
• Animated Short Film – Student
• Animated Short Film – Professional
• Music Video
• Scientific Visualization
• Animation for Young Audiences
• Experimental Animation/Visual Music – Student
• Experimental Animation/Visual Music – Professional
The finalists for these categories are listed below. Please keep in mind the categories Scientific Visualization, Animation for Young Audiences and Experimental Animation/Visual Music - Student have only one finalist. These categories are not included in this list so as not to reveal the winner.
• Animated Short Film – Student
Tong
Directed by: David Cellier, Florent Limouzin, Arnaud Real (FRANCE)
Ecole Supérieure des métiers Artistiques (ESMA)
Synopsis: A small Chinese scientist fortuitously invents a machine that disintegrates. This invention will be used to save the humanity of a planetary threat. Unfortunately the machine will not function as envisioned …
Replay
Directed by: Anthony Voisin, Zakaria Boumediane, Fabien Felicite-Zulma, Camille Delmeule (FRANCE),
Ecole Supérieure des métiers Artistiques (ESMA)
Synopsis: In a dry world where oxygen is missing and human being have to live underground, Lana, a young woman, lives alone with her little brother, Theo. She takes care of him. Everyday she brings him things from the surface of the earth to buy them. One day, she brings a lot of things and Theo is attracted by one of them. Disobedient, Theo takes the object and goes to look for the mysterious place where his sister found it. He will do a special meeting.
Simulacra
Directed by: Tatchapon Lertwirojkul (USA)
School of Visual Arts
Synopsis: In the vast galaxy, there is one robot planet where every natural life was extinct, where only machine and robot live in that planet. One day, a robot found a piece of organic life existing in his world. He's very excited about his discovery and wants to safeguard that organic piece. Unfortunately, that piece is in the dangerous and restricted area on his planet. Finally, he decides to risk and save that piece. Then his adventure begins.
Home
Directed by: Matt Faust (USA)
Louisiana State University
Synopsis: This film is a bittersweet portrayal of a house in Chalmette, Louisiana that was flooded by Katrina and then mistakenly torn down a year later. The central theme of this video is the essence of home and the feeling of loss that occurs when home becomes a memory. This loss may occur in extreme and abrupt forms as a result of a disaster like Katrina, but more often it is experienced in a subtler manner a result of the inevitable change that comes with time. And while time and place may meet again in such a special way as to form a new home for some, that first experience of home must come to an end and the life that happened there can only exist as memories. The universality of this theme is conveyed in a way that detached observers of Katrina can relate to so that they may see beyond the forensic analysis of Katrina’s aftermath and gain a deeper understanding of what has been lost by so many.
• Animated Short Film – Professional
Insight
Directed by: Louise Bergholt Sorensen (DENMARK)
The Animation Workshop
Synopsis: A homeless woman who lives in an alley meets a girl that looks at her differently than other people.
Une petite histoire de l'image animée
Directed by: Joris Clerté (FRANCE)
Doncvoilà & Mikros Image
Synopsis: Discover finally the real story of the animated image! From Plato's cavern to Harry Potter passing by King Kong, magical special effects to digital VFX, we explain EVERYTHING...in 3 minutes.
Raccoon & Crawfish
Directed by: Cal Waller, Karabo Legwaila, Peter Hale, Shaun Foster, Heather Carpini,
Mark Edwards (USA)
Synopsis: 'Raccoon & Crawfish'' uses modern technology to tell an ancient Oneida Indian legend that has been passed down through countless generations of storytellers. Like many Oneida legends, this story uses characters from the animal kingdom to point a moral - in the case, the dangers of boasting and deception. A hungry raccoon searches for food and finds a crawfish on a quest for glory. Their battle will decide the fate between an ego full of pride or a belly full of food.
• Music Video
Whatcha Got?
Directed by: Rogier Wieland (NETHERLANDS)
Synopsis: The music video for the song "Whatcha got" by Dutch rockabilly band Trenchcoat is a stop-motion animation entirely cut out of paper and cardboard.
Niege
Directed by: Stéphane Berla (FRANCE)
LN Production
Synopsis: The last Dionysos video mixing animation, real shots and images of archives. The song is a tribute to the disappeared mom of the singer Mathias. The video tells the story of a puppet which tries to escape from a snow ball into which the marionette’s been imprisoned for years.
• Experimental Animation/Visual Music – Professional
Day Dream
Directed by: Bo Wang (CHINA)
Beijing HUTOON Animation LTD.Company
Synopsis: An idea comes from the author's idea of a documentary that cannot be realized: a person in the street shooting at will, tracking his/her life trajectory until he/she encounters another person, which leads to another shooting.
Mercurius
Directed by: Brett Battey (USA)
DeMontfort University (UK)
Synopsis: Both the audio and visual components of the work have no cuts or edits. What we hear is a continual transformation of a one synthesis process, just as what we see is the continuous animation of nearly 12,000 individual points. Spirals can symbolize unity and transcendence, but they can also suggest a spider’s web or a destructive vortex. Mercurius’ ambiguity combines multiple sensibilities of the spiral. If there is a unity here, it doesn’t express itself in a balanced mandala form, but through the underlying process that exhibits a multitude of seemingly-conflicting states. Hence the title: Mercurius (Latin for Mercury) is the swift messenger, a symbol of the volatile and unstable.
For more information on the festival, please visit www.redstickfestival.org .
Publish Date:
04-15-2008
