pura vida

Four flawed friends travel to tropics where things go wrong.

A graduation film made at Estonian Academy of Arts.

In the film I wanted to explore a traveling theme, and how it always feels good to be back home even after holidays in a tropical paradise. A logline: “East or west - home is best”.

9.5 mins | Estonia | 2018
production: Estonian Academy of Arts
direction, animation: Nata Metlukh
sound, music: Nicolas Martigne

process

The film is set in New York and Costa Rica. Pura vida means pure life in Spanish, and in Costa Rica it is a special phrase for different things like greetings, saying “thanks”, “what’s up”, “take care”, or just a happy exclamation expression. It kind of means everything and nothing at the same time, like the film itself.

The film is more visual rather than narrative, and I'll cover the making-of its aesthetics.

To get this specific, a little bit ugly look, I set several rules in technique, style, animation, and character design. My main aesthetic principle was to embrace digitalness with rough edges and vivid colors.

I used only a square unsmoothed brush, with a zoomed out stage at 25% to get even shakier lines.

style

I wanted to show the contrast between two different worlds of New York and Costa Rica through the style. NY was supposed to be dark, dense, and overwhelming, with overlapping animation and sounds. CR is slow and chill, and it had to be simple and clean — I made it mostly white with splashes of colors.

The real Costa Rica is tropical and colorful, but in my film it’s kind of an abstract one, and I wanted to show a relaxed atmosphere with some local carelessness.

unfinished-looking backgrounds to keep the place abstract

animation

I wanted the animation style to be abrupt and snappy. For that I animated mostly on 3’s. On 3’s means there are only 8 images per second, as opposed to the smooth mainstream animation with 12, 24, or 30 images per second.

characters

Each character of the film has flaws in their personalities.

Jan, the girl, is too bossy and impatient. Q, the bird, is a paranoid drug addict. Bob, the big guy, is an alcoholic. And Carl has no personality — that’s why he constantly loses his head.

To show those flaws I put errors into the design: all the characters are asymmetrical, disproportional, and their facial features are slightly off.

And each character has an irritating element: Jan has this inclined pose, and she walks off balance. Q has the glitching glasses, helping him to hide his personality. Bob’s t-shirt has this noisy animated texture on it. And Carl has his unstable detached head.

Secondary characters — Costa Rican locals — have this simple white design to match their surrounding.

There were many design iterations until I found the right form.

There were two technical challenges with character design.

First one was that the outlines had different widths and colors — it took a lot of time to color them.

And the second one was Bob’s animated pattern on his t-shirt. He was animated on 3 layers: his body, the t-shirt, and the animated pattern.

For the Carl reference I built his paper mache puppet with a detachable head on a magnet.

The world premiere of Pura Vida was at a local cinema in Tallinn along with other graduation films.

I made a poster for the event featuring Antonio, the mysterious character from the film, who lives inside the volcano and wears an alpaca mask. He is hidden in background in almost every scene!

awards

Best Animated Film at Shorts That Are Not Pants Film Festival (Canada, 2019)

Original Design award at Animation Block Party (USA, 2018)

Short of the Week (USA, 2018)

Life-Affirming Freedom of Creativity at Multivision Festival (Russia, 2018)

Nomination for the Best Student Film at European Animation Awards (France, 2018)