Hello and welcome to the production diary of the animated short film “What’s up?“. On these pages we give you a glimpse of what’s going on behind the scenes, where our short is slowly but surely taking shape. To check out our Facebook page go here
To start off, let me give you a little back-story. My name is Nick and I’m the producer of the film. While I was working as a production manager on the 3D feature film Niko and the Way to the Stars at Anima Vitae studios a studio animator, Meruan Salim, approached me with an idea for an animated short. I liked the idea and his enthusiasm, and soon we we’re planning how to go about financing and producing the film.
This was way back in April 2008. After finishing my job on Niko I continued to work as a freelancer for other companies as well as pushing forward my own projects. Together with Meruan we had lot’s of planning meetings, made proposals for the two finnish institutions that fund short film, and eventually also got meetings with them. We also got the finnish broadcasting channel YLE1 on board, they were actually the first ones we met and the first ones who said “YES!”
Things got complicated last fall, as it turned out that one of the two funding bodies did not appreciate our script. This meant we had to go back to file away at the budget and try to see if we could raise the budget from YLE, the Finnish Film Fund and by providing our own time as investment. Finally our efforts paid off, and we signed contracts with both funding bodies.
During all this time Meruan kept working on Huuhaa and the location and refining his idea of the film. He’d already invested lots and lots of his own time when we finally got the contracts, so most of our own investment has already been paid in.
Throughout the summer, our rigger Kustaa and modeller Aki were hard at work, starting to build both Huuhaa and his habitat. In August we had our kick-off meeting for the production, which I’ll cover in the next post, so stay tuned!
