I think it's safe to presume, if you’ve reached till this part of my website, that you already know I’m a person who gets weirdly obsessed with things, something I've come to like about myself to a point where I'm almost proud of it.
After a nice movie, most people who go home, talk about a few scenes in the movie, maybe share certain things they really learnt and like and go back to their lives. Not me, no.
I watch a movie and then go on to spend the entirety of the next couple of weeks trying to find out everything I can about the writer, director, actor, producer or anyone who had anything critical to do with what moved me. I work at it almost with the dedication of a serial stalker, following their entire careers and creating these exact timelines of what they have done, who did they collaborate with, who inspires them and who they are.
In 2019, ‘The Witness’ was one such film that led me down the rabbit hole into the world of animation leading to one such human. It is a short film, part of the ‘Love, Death and Robots’ series created by Tim Miller and David Fincher on Netflix. The series itself is pretty cool, and unique in the way its structured and created. Different animators, different styles, different stories under the umbrella of some common themes. Most of the animations in the series captivated me with either their narrative, fun animations or just plain humor. The Witness however, struck me. I watched it, and I HAD to know who made it. This was one of those times, where had I seen an artist’s personality so clearly in their work.
The short 10-minute film’s anxious atmosphere is conveyed compellingly through its extraordinary visuals. I found myself replaying scenes, trying to figure out how each frame was created. There was an overlap of traditional oil painting style, with this extremely futuristic cyberpunk aesthetic and comic book like interjections to indicate surprise and suddenness. The style was something I had never seen before, and truly new and unique, a language completely personal to its author. The Hong-Kong like city of this slightly dystopian future with empty streets and impossibly dense buildings, with heights and scale that were exaggerated, was beautifully crafted together in these extremely curated colors palettes. The film had cleverly made shots that mimicked real-life camera shots, going in and out of focus during the commotion of the story. The attention to detail, while still making everything seem raw and rough around the edges. The character design was so eccentric and yet everything felt extremely realistic at the same time. It was like I could feel the textures of their clothes, but it felt so plastic and doll-like too. I could not take my eye off the screen and had to watch it at least 20 times to even begin to fathom how someone could come up with something like this.
The Witness is written and directed and animated by Alberto Mielgo, a Spanish animator. And he is one of the humans whose journey I’m really interested in following. When reading more about him, I realized he aims to create his own space in the industry, working with people on projects that he’s personally invested and interested about - which is something I have started to realize about myself as well. To quote him “Something that either accidentally or on purpose I always want to do in my projects is to break the repetitive and very successful “look” and pipeline that all the big Giants Corps in animation had been smashing in our faces for the last decade, up to a point that is difficult to differentiate who did what.”
I had had a similar feeling of style when I watch the animated ‘Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse’. And, lo and behold, thanks to my stalker habits, I did surprisingly find out that he was involved in doing the initial Production Design/ Art Direction for that but wasn’t a part of the whole project - you can definitely see his imprints in there. As I read more about him, I could see how his work truly represented who he is as a human.
Like all other art forms and mediums, animation has always interested me, but it is a tedious task for the procrastinator that I am to ever finish even a 15 second short film. It is one the toughest, most time consuming, and laborious things to do and I have immense respect and admiration for someone who can do it with such beauty and thought.
His website was one of the early inspirations for this portfolio. The way he candidly expressed who he is and what he’s passionate about without trying even in the least to sound professional, or polished, made me like him even more.
When the series came out with their third Volume, I was most excited about his film ‘Jibaru’. It is as crazy, wild, beautiful, uncomfortable, brilliant as the first one. I was excited to find a behind the scenes and the making of it, trying to get insight into his process. Click here to watch that.