Francis is an inventor. His invention is supposed to change the world. He forgot about one thing: dreams always cost too much. He is focused only on himself and his work and realizes the gravity of the situation only when it is too late.

"The Kinematograph" is an adaptation of a comic with the same title created with a pen and crayon by Mateusz Skutnik. It was included in the album "Rewolucje: Monochrom". It all started with a journalist, Krzysztof Lipka-Chudzik, who introduced the afore-mentioned album to Tomek Baginski. The idea was simple: it was all about a concept for a new film that the director was also looking for. Baginski, who is always bombarded with new film projects, was close to dropping the challenge posed by Skutnik’s art until he started to read "The Kinematograph". The comic turned out to be a ready-made film script.Three Years of "The Kinematograph"
Realization process in Tomek Baginski’s latest film took fourteen months altogether. It all began in 2006.

They had the first go at the project three years ago. In 2006 after reading the comic the first models, sketches and storyboards were created. A small group of friends came together and created a preproduction package. It was closely related to the aesthetics of the comic. It was nice when it comes to background but the characters had too large heads and ears. It looked great in the comic but when they started composing the film, did not look that good according to the director. The characters looked like rodents, like some rats. Since it was supposed to be a film about feelings and they had to believe that a creature with a head like a balloon and eyes like lumps of coal could be the object of our hero’s feelings, it stopped being believable.

Graphic Concept
Jakub Jablonski’s appearance brought new life to the project. He designed the characters which matched the film language and format perfectly. The world that he proposed, even though it referred to Mateusz Skutnik’s art, took on a character of a colourful fable where warmth was met by melancholy.

They did not want the aesthetics to bring the viewer down, but to make the sad message of the story lighter. Everything was supposed to resemble a fairy-tale but at the same time not to be cartoonish or Hollywood-like. They wanted it to be associated with a puppet film. I designed the characters. The idea was that the background would refer to illustrations in a children’s book - explains Jakub Jablonski.

The film takes place at the end of the 19th century. You can recognize the Victorian period and even though the action supposedly takes place in England, the setting can be associated with many other places.

Realization
The making of a short film turned out to be a real challenge for the Platige Image team as they had never had to face anything like that before. About fifty graphic artists took part in this enterprise. For almost a year, they were working on bringing Francis the Inventor’s story to life on the screen. 270 processors at a total power of 675 GHz, i.e. one third computing power of the whole Studio. The film includes 17,250 frames, 40,000 frames in strips. 5,000 trees with 10,000 leaves and 100,000 polygons each were created in the computers’ memory. There are eighteen characters and seventy-four props in "The Kinematograph". The whole film weighs over 1.5 terabytes.

"The Kinematograph" is a huge challenge - twelve minutes of animation is a real nightmare. They usually make thirty-second stuff and here the stakes were raised much higher. Before making such a project they were gaining experience and skills for the last three years.

More Information at www.thekinematograph.com and www.platige.com. Image and Video Courtesy of Tomek Baginski. Video Encoding: 3Dup.com