Reel

– '23

We are finally into 2023! Ephemeral experiences and invoking impish muses are zeitgeist-defining traits. So we set to ourselves the challenge of conveying our spirit, our energy and our mojo in a one minute trip. Wanna join us?

This is the result of (almost) five, and intense, years as a studio, and it is dedicated to all of our friends and families. Did you know that list includes you? ;)

It is with great pleasure that we proudly present you a brand new Clubcamping reel! 

THE INTRO: SUMMONING THE CONCEPT  

We´ve thought a lot about our identity as a studio for this. What are the themes and visuals we resonate the most with? What trademarks do we have? What are the steps we follow (consciously or not) to achieve our goals? What is our style!?!?!?

Typical existential, gut wrenching questions.

We know we want to explore different art and animation styles as ways to expand our knowledge and tools; we love tight animation timings and dynamic cameras; and we love tricky comp looks.

The way we explore those interests involves lots of routine activities we always do: from religiously setting our projects at 24fps, to how we prepare our PSD files for comp, to working the exact timing camera movements eases it should have, to the specific filters we apply at the end of the process for the final look. 

Those are a few of our rites and rituals, so that idea totally clicked: a ritual.

From there, it was a matter of letting our pool of pop culture knowledge sublimate into the story without asking too many questions.

So we started testing some styles and ideas. Some morphologies and tones started to make sense.

This new creepy kid was going to be the main character, and Baté, the embodiment of Clubcamping, was going to be the summoned entity.

We put together a quick trashy animatic to test all that immediately.

From there, we went straight to producing final art styleframes. We wanted to explore different aesthetics that reflected a creepy kid´s distorted perception of reality. 

The first aesthetic being his true reality, the second how he saw the world while doing “magic”, and the final one how he perceived the world once he is fully invested in his ritual.

From a narrative perspective, this sudden change of visual tones was key to resignifying the common trope of an evil kid doing evil things in evil aesthetics. The second style was key to achieve this, because it went in a totally different direction than what the first style suggested.

From there, there wasn't anything technically challenging or that we haven't tried out before, so we won't delve too much into that. Here's our quick round of BTS entrails.

EDITING SPELLS  

There´s a story here: back at the beginning of 2020, we were nearly finishing our first reel. It didn't have a great variety of projects, but it conveyed our particular energy at the time. Baté´s sugar rush was the intro.

We struggled a lot with finding the right tone, the right rhythm. But everything moved forward, one baby step at a time.We edited with reference music, and then Facu Capece made a killer track that fit perfectly.

We were almost there, and because of that reason we kept postponing the launch. Life was good. 

Then, March 2020. World chaos.

That reel quickly felt old and we just couldn´t release it.
But it was a truly inspiring experience. It told us a lot about our vision and narrative ideology.
Back in 2023, we faced the challenge of starting all over. How much would it take to make it work this time?

We opened Premiere, imported some assets…and the previous reel experience kicked in, like magic.

Clips were flying all over the timeline, and lucky accidents happened regularly.
Surprising transitions, match cuts that we didn’t think of, inserts that worked or not depending on just one frame more or less, animation bits that weren't particularly outstanding in the projects they were part of, but here, juxtaposing with other shots, totally stood out. We were in a state of flow.

In less than 2 weeks we had the main cut all wrapped up.
We did some finishing touches in some transitions, and the thing was done.

Making our reel is a terrific exercise to explore our identity and creativity, creating new meaning through deconstruction of our past projects.

We love each clip we pieced together, but we understood that they´re just occasional cogs we can eventually change. The precious learning here is seizing the tools to convey the emotions and energies we are made of.