My goal is to shoot a short film mixing live action and traditional animation.
Icarus, a 30 year old man, has inherited a few things from his father Enrique: the craft of a clockmaker, a strange love for all things past and an obsession for the idea of flying.
The old man is obssesed by the stories of the wing builders of old: Archytas fom Tarentum and Lu Buan, historical characters from far away geographies who built flying machines 400 years before Christ. Abbas Ibn Firnas, a philosopher from Malaga who built and tested a flying machine in the 8th century. Jan Wnek, a polish peasant who built a set of wings and jumped from the church tower to reach a height of around 330 feet.
All of these characters, amongst others, are of Enrique´s interest. Icarus thinks this is so because the old man himself secretly dreams of being some sort of adventurer from the past.
The old man spends endless hours reading about this, searching for marvellous flying cities on sky maps and drawing blueprints for his own set of wings.
One day, Icarus´ father vanishes. Icarus searches for him in the nearby cities until he assumes his father is gone for good. Perhaps he is dead? A year later, a package arrives in the mail: its an old notebook filled with notes and drawings. This is his fathers travelling log. In it, Icarus reads how the old man built his own wings to fly away from the labyrinth of the world, just like Daedalus did. Enique tells how he slept inside the nest of a giant condor who fed him raw met, taking the old man for its chick, how he slept one night on the cold soft surface of a cloud, and how he kept on flying to the top of the world, until the curved horizon of the earth became flat: that is, how he travelled to the past that had obssesed him.
In the end, he tells how he made his way through the clouds, flying beetween the rays of the sun, long and sharp like golden blades, until he saw, not far away, a port in the sky. The citiy he had searched for.
Along with the log, the old man has included the blueprint for the wings as well as the coordinates for the city, challenging Ícaro to go after him. The wings have an embedded clock system, that runs the other way aroud. When travelling to the past, one always has to go the other way around. After some time, the energy of the wings is over. This means whoever decides to fly away, must do so quickly if he wants to reach his destination. But what destination is this, if it is all a fantasy from Enrique´s mind? Or ist?
What will Icarus do? Fly?
The scenes depicting Icarus and Enrique´s life will be live action, while all of the fantastic section of the film will be animated. I plan to shoot for four days and the money coming from idea.me (and you) will be invested in paying for actors and locations. I will invest more money from my own pocket to pay for postproduction assistants.
The short film is a stand alone poyect, although it is also the companion piece to a graphic novel, now in the works. Both are personal projects.
I think making this project a reality will make it easier for me to shoot, later on, the adventures of Icarus in search of his father.
México
