What happens if an essentially fantastic story, full of dragons and monsters, treats its animation as realistically as possible?
In Dragonkeeper, its Director, Salvador Simó, and Abraham López Guerrero, its Animation Director, have pursued a realistic and restrained animation style, more inspired by the real image of the 80's live-action adventure films (Indiana Jones, The Goonies, Star Wars)than later animated ones.
They have built the animation on a very solid base of narrative character development, from the psychology and the essential motivations of the character in the plot, treating the shots as if they had been filmed on a set whose actors in this case would have been the animators. In this talk they will explain some of the techniques and methods used for this purpose.
Salvador Simó
Salvador is a film director and screenwriter. In his beginnings, in the field of traditional animation, he worked for several companies, including Disney Paris, and later moved to London to work at MPC, on projects such as Narnia, Prince Caspian, The Werewolf, Prince of Persia and the James Bond film Skyfall, where his knowledge of cinematography and animation opened many doors for him. After working on CG projects in Asia, in his second stage at MPC he developed his work as head of film sequences in The Jungle Book and Pirates of the Caribbean.
In 2016 he returned to Spain to direct the feature film project Buñuel: Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas, which won the European Film Academy Awards for Best European Animated Feature Film and the Goya Awards. It was the first time that an animated film was in the shortlist, 3 candidates, to represent Spain at the Oscar Awards in the International Film category, sharing the nomination with Pedro Almodóvar and Alejandro Amenábar.
Abraham López
Abraham is a Director and Animation Supervisor with more than 20 years of experience in the world of 3D animation, winner of the Goya 2021 award with Blue and Malone Impossible Cases.
In the world of advertising, he has made spots for BMW, Adidas and Disney. His filmography as Director and Animation Supervisor includes the RTVE series Clanners and the feature film Deep by The Thinklab Media.
He is currently the animation director of the feature film Dragonkeeper, the most ambitious international co-production between China and Spain in history and is in development of the international co-production The Impossible Journey, the first feature film in the Blue and Malone universe.
