Jun 15, 2018

Annecy Chile's Hit TV Series "Paper Port" Begins Pre-Production for Feature Film (Exclusive)

Chile's Zumbástico Studios has been producing a wealth of animated shorts and series for over 15 years. One of its most recent hits is the mixed-media animated fantasy series "Paper Port," which is currently finishing production on its second season and will air in the coming months in Señal Colombia, Discovery Kids throughout Latin America, China, and many other regions. China, and many other regions.

The studio also announced that it has begun pre-production on an animated feature film for Paper Port. The project has received initial funding from the Audiovisual Foundation of Chile.

Created by Alvaro Seppi, Hugo Covarrubias, Cristian Ruito, Carlos Brecher, and Gabriel Noe, Paper Port is a creative and inventive combination of papercraft, stop motion, and digital animation, The 11-minute episodic program tells the story of a young girl who wakes up each day with a new superpower, and is the first animated television co-production involving four Latin American countries: Gloob (Brazil), Señal Colombia, Pakapaka (Argentina), and TVN (Chile). Initially, the Chilean TV station CNTV financed the project.

Cartoon Brew asked Paper Port CEO and Creative Director Alvaro Seppi and Director Hugo Covarrubias how the show was launched, including the custom-made production method behind the show.

Zumbástico was founded in 2002 by Seppi, Gabriel Noe, Cristian Ruito, and Claudio 'Guay' Mas (who left in 2009). The studio is based in Santiago and has worked on a variety of projects that have aired primarily in Latin America. Among them are Cartoon Network's Zumbastico Fantastico (hence the studio's name - originally Sólo por las Niñas), Disney's Martian Soap 2111, Canal Pacapaca's Horatio and the Plasticines" by Canal Pacapaca of Argentina, among others.

A 2003 music video by PapaNegro, an artist who became popular on MTV, utilizing a form of "photo puppetry," was a turning point of sorts for Zumbástico and its approach to paper-based animation. We didn't really know what we were doing," he said. But in the end, when you look at it now, it's a collage of pixilation. We animated it in Final Cut, and we didn't even know how to use After Effects.

This technique was used in Zumbastico's first series, Block. "Of course, we made all the mistakes one could make in the first production," said Zumbastico. We were writing scripts at the same time. It was like chaos, but we learned a lot."

Years later, Zumbástico was trying to mix the stop-motion experience of its newly hired director, Hugo Covarrubias, with the studio's experience with children's programming. The first production was known as Paper Friends, which later became Paper Ports; the budget for the first season of 26 11-minute episodes was $1.6 million. The studio spent a year in pre-production to develop the animation system.

"We wanted to do everything on paper, but we thought about production and decided to do the faces digitally," says Covarrubias. He originally had a background in theater and also experimented with live lip-sync for animations projected on stage.

Paper remains central to Paper Port. I like the feel and texture of paper," says Covarrubias. In fact, Zumbastico calls the show's animation technique "paper motion. The sets are based on paper or cardboard. The characters also appear to be made of paper, but initially they are made of cuttable plastic to ensure rigidity, which is then covered with printed paper.

In the stop-motion animation, the characters' limbs are connected by magnetic terminals. Director Seppi says, "The positions and designs of the limbs vary." "So when I really want to reach something, I change arms. It's very fast. All the parts of the puppet are interchangeable with magnets."

The character's face will be added as a 2D animation, but will retain its textures and paper-like feel. According to director Seppi, working with facial animation includes emulating the imperfections of cutouts. Scenes were shot with a digital SLR camera, and for the camera movements, Zumbastico avoided the usually expensive motion control camera system and instead built his own. This is all part of Zumbastico's goal of realizing his work as efficiently as possible.

"That's how we approach things," says Seppi. 'We experiment, we build, we execute. That's what we have to do. We're trying to bring in creative approaches, not just the technical aspects."

"We're trying to bring in a creative approach,"

"We're trying to bring in a creative approach, not just the technical aspects.

That approach has served them well so far. Zumbastico recently produced a mini-series with Discovery Kids called Papelnautas (Paper Nuts).

The studio, which recently began a partnership with Canada's Pipeline Studios, has also begun work on two new projects: first, a showcase series it produced for Cartoon Network Latin America called Zumbastico Fantastico The first is a spin-off series from one of the mini-shows in the Zumbastico Fantastico showcase series produced for Cartoon Network Latin America. The series is titled Piggy-Doggy and the League of Villainy and was created by Bernardita Ojeda, a partner at Pajaro Estudio. [The other is a series for young children called Doggyworld, co-produced with Argentina's OVO Lab, a children's entertainment company run by Cielo Salviolo and Mariana Roterspil, former heads of Argentina's Pakapaka public network for children. entertainment company.

Both Seppi and Covarrubias also say that animation production in Chile has surged in recent years, to the point where studios and producers can confidently propose new projects. The Chilean animation industry has grown rapidly over the past few years," said Covarrubias. There are a lot of new animators."

"We have state support, and the government is providing new funding. And for the past 15 years we have had funding for television, and now we have a couple of funds that are dedicated to animated films."