A Short Summer Film

“Summer at the Office” is a one minute film about an office worker who uses an exel sheet to escape into a blue, cooling sea.

The initial impulse for the idea was my impressions of the office environment. Ribbed curtains, spotted linoleum floors, colorful spiral folders, L-shaped desks and time spent waiting. I found drawings on this topic in an old notebook, related to a film idea that I stopped developing. The impressions remained clear in my minds eye and I still wished to convey this mood. Also it’s a nice way to get closure with the initial drawings. I just needed to write a suitable story. While noting ideas and scribbling objects in the notebook, a parallel grew between the facade of an apartment building and an Excel spreadsheet. What if an apartment building could be manipulated in the same way as a spreadsheet? Then the thoughts started to flow on their own.

Lately I've been planning my animation in Blender because it allows me to draw, animate either frame by frame or as a cutout animation, and edit clips in the same environment. It's not perfect, but I don't like switching between programs as I move back and forth between the different tasks all the time.

Ok, it turns out that a minute is quite short, right? The script I wrote had significantly more ideas than could fit in the given time, and only a minimal core of the film was left. What are the most important shots to show? What is the least amount of time I can keep them in front of me? But at the same time, you also have to make sure that there is still fun and that there is some breathing room somewhere. The animatic ended up looking like this:

The shots are planned so that there is little animation. Not that I am just lazy, but I tried to keep the production to a month. To speed up the pace of work, I designed a minimalist character to be animated at a low frame rate.

I’m starting to like low framerate animation a lot! It was a joy to do and every pose felt important.

The Animatic plans were drawn in such detail that was very helpful for creating the finished drawings. Yay! It was drawn and animated in Krita and edited in DaVinci Resolve.

Since the free sound banks didn't have quite the sounds I wanted, we recorded all the sounds we needed for the film ourselves with Timo's help. We had equipment at home that we could use for recording, the weather was beautiful and warm in the spring, so we took a trip to Keila-Joa to record the sounds of flowing water in the open air. In the middle of a workday, there weren't many people there besides us. It was all so pleasant that I had a fantasy about how great it would be to be a traveling sound recorder who tries to capture different environments at different times of the day and seasons.

Timo also composed the music for the film. You can listen to his music here.

If you live in Estonia, you can watch the film “Summer in the Office Building” on the portal “Arkaader”.

If you are anywhere else in the world or the ISS, you will have to wait a little longer.

I am happy with the completed mini-film and grateful that the idea was selected by EFI. It is satisfying to see how it becomes easier to make creative decisions over time. In addition, I did not feel any great pressure to perform that would bring me down. Now it is again hot outside and I would like to dive into the blue sea like in the film.

Have a great summer!

-Liisi Grünberg