MAKING OF – Parabola (Satellite Dish)

A quirky 1-min animation based on a silly Hungarian children's poem by the recognized Lackfi János, preformed by Busa Pista a superb Hungarian beat-boxer.



I've got this job from MOME Anim, the university I graduated from. It's been years now that the Uni runs these series called 'animated poems' as part of the workshop tasks. The aim is to make Hungarian contemporary literature available for children. My earlier film Patakiskola (Streamschool) from 2010 was also part of this pursuit.

1) Choosing the right poem

Each frame was hand-painted with water color.

As a start I got to choose from a bunch of contemporary poems for children. I found Parabola (Satellite Dish) the most fun and entertaining and it seemed to be a quick production in terms of animation (which I was happy for after making an epic graduation film Rabbit and Deer for a year and a half).

János Lackfi is one of the main character of Hungarian contemporary literature and I'm glad that I can share his fantastic work both nationally and internationally.

2) Creating a strong soundtrack

Pista Busa - rapper, beatboxer / János Lackfi - Hungarian poet, writer

The first important question was the audio track on which I always place great emphasis. I wanted to break the convention of 'boring' voice over narration and Lackfi's Parabola was a perfect piece for that with it's snappy, playful style. That's how I came to ask Pista Busa – one of Hungary's best rapper, beatboxer – to perform the poem.

After Busa made the awesome one-min soundtrack I started to work on the animation in Adobe Flash using a drawing tablet. My main thing in animation is to always find a way to include something handmade, something real even if it's mainly done on computer. This way there's always going to be some unique touch that's only yours.

3) The animation process

When the animation was done in Flash I saved each frame as a JPEG sequence (only the black lines without the colored shapes) and printed them on fifty A3 sized water-color papers – 10 frames on each sheet. When the prints were done I started to paint each frame with water-color...

Animating in Adobe Flash

Painting frames with water-color.

The last part was to capture each frame in order so that I can line up the whole movie again in the computer and export it. For this I used a Canon 60D camera, two Faithfull Task Light and the Dragonframe stopmotion software.

Shooting back the painted frames.

I often think about how an animation filmmaker can show all the effort and work that goes into making a film by creating each frame one by one. I think the 'result' of this project is a good example to map down the actual film to a physical artifact. 50 sheets of paper with 500 hand-painted frames = 1 minute animated film.

The whole film laid in front of me - 500 painted frames.

English version

Joseph Wallace - director

I always try to make all my works available and understandable to everyone and that's the reason that there's an English version too. The brilliant translation was made by my friend Joseph Wallace who is an award-winning film and theater director.
Check out his great films on his Vimeo page.


If you have any question feel free to drop a message through my Director's Facbook page (you can also like it ;)

Thank you for reading!