Spanish Animated Documentary “Migropolis” Looks At Children Living In Foreign Countries
Two students from Barcelona have produced an animated documentary as their graduate project that focuses on being a young immigrant in a foreign country.
Carlos Azcuaga and Karolina Villarraga presented the film, ‘Migropolis’, as their final project for their Masters of Animation at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.
Carlos is originally from Mexico, while Karolina is from Columbia. In an exclusive interview with Animation News, Carlos told us that they “wanted to make a film that could mean something to people like us, who had left their home for another. We also had experience working in children’s entertainment, so it all fell into place naturally.”
‘Migropolis’ focuses on four children: Mancel from Columbia; Tatiana from Ecuador; and Mohamed and Amin from Iran. It is a narrative documentary, with the four children describing different aspects of their experiences of moving to Barcelona, including the language differences and linguistic misunderstandings, and leaving behind friends, family and loved ones.
The animation is childish, bold and quirky. It is a 2D, CGI blend, with Carlos and Karolina using CGI toon-shaded characters in a 2D environment. It also includes a 2D cut-scene with the child describing the difficulty of bringing his cat across from Columbia with him.
Carlos and Karolina conducted interviews with immigrant children living in Barcelona over a period of several weeks, before narrowing it down to the four chosen. They chose those four in particular because “we felt they gave us the best sounds bites to use in an engaging script.” All the interviews are unscripted and were recorded live.
This proved to be a massive challenge for the pair of them. As Carlos notes, “first you have to find the right children, and then you have to make them talk while making sure you have your mic ready because no good sound bite can ever sound the same when repeated, and even more so when working with children.”
They designed the characters and used their interviews with the children as the voice-over to the documentary. Carlos was in charge of the CGI technical aspects of the film, like the character models and their rigs, as well as the character animation and acting for all the scenes. He told Animation News that “all the characters were produced and animated in Autodesk Maya.”
Karolina, who is a graphic designer and motion graphics artist was in charge of all the graphics, 2D animations, editing and post production, as well as directing the film. All the backgrounds and graphics were all drawn digitally, before being animated by Karolina in After Effects.
Carlos commented that time was a major concern of theirs while producing Migropolis. “It actually ended up being a huge project just for the two of us,” he said. “Of course we were blessed to have friends who could help us out in some aspects besides animation and compositing, like the sound design, the original music [by Radical Animal Beat], and the 2D animated sequence (the one with the cat). ‘Migropolis’ has been selected to appear in a few animation festivals in Spain, including Animabasauri in Basque Country, Animac in Catalonia and Animayo in the canary Islands. If you can’t make it that far, you can view it here.
You can watch the video here … (in Spanish)…