Luminaris is a multi-award winning animated short film made using the pixilation technique, combining real actors interacting with animated objects and time-lapse sequences. The film tells the story of a man living in a world controlled and timed by light. Every morning, the inhabitants of that world are woken up and pulled to their jobs by sunlight, as if this was some sort of magnet. The main character has a routinary job in a factory that makes electric bulbs. But he has something else in mind that could change the order of things. The film was inspired by an instrumental tango piece called "Lluvia de Estrellas" (Star Rain) composed by Osmar Maderna in the forties.
Director Juan Pablo Zaramella explains, "I first became acquainted with this piece of music as a child, because my elders used to listen to it. I had always liked this piece but, as an adult, it gradually dawned on me that this music could be like a score of a film that had never been made. In 2008 I was granted a creativity residency by Abbaye de Fontevraud, in France. I decided to take this opportunity to develop this project. Orginally, I approached the project as a puppet animation story, but doing some pixilation tests in the gardens of Fontevraud, just for fun, the seed of the present short appeared: the idea of sunlight as a magnetic force."
The complete production of the film took two years and a half, mainly due to the unpredictability of weather conditions and sunlight movement, that changes the shadows on the locations every day.
"Both the speed and the intensity of sunlight changed during the shooting of a take, so we had to modify the time-lapse frequency and the exposure of the photographs all the time", explains Sergio Piñeyro, director of photography.
"In a world controlled and timed by light, an ordinary man has a plan that could
change the natural order of things."
Luminaris es un corto animado en la técnica llamada pixilación, que consiste en la animación en stop motion de actores de carne y hueso, interactuando con objetos animados. La película cuenta la historia de un hombre que vive en un mundo controlado por la luz. Cada mañana, los habitantes de este mundo son despertados y arrastrados por la luz solar hacia sus trabajos, como si esta fuera una fuerza magnética. El protagonista tiene un trabajo rutinario en una fábrica de lámparas. Pero tiene algo más en mente que podrá cambiar el órden de las cosas.
“Tanto la velocidad y la intensidad de la luz del sol cambiaban durante el rodaje de una toma, y teníamos que modificar tanto la frecuencia de tiempo entre foto y foto como la exposición”, explica el director de fotografía Sergio Piñeyro.
