“Life buoy” is the project of the students from the National University of Arts from Bucharest, Romania. The film was made in mid 2010 and it is a music video for the song “Life buoy” by the band “The Pixels”. Movie is using the mix of stop motion animation techniques in order to tell the story.

Synopsis:

A modern day knight slips into an imaginary where he is not welcome. He undergoes daring challenges to stay in the world where he is alone. This journey is a tribute to the tales of 1001 nights and to classic Romanian fairytales, but it all happens in a modern world, where the bicycle replaces the horse, a cardboard dog replaces the dragon, and some chairs stand in for the mountain, the place where the truth lies. Whether he finds the truth or not will determine the fate of the young knight: he will either go back to the real world, or he will live this imaginary experience as if it was a dream.
Everything can happen all over again.

Technical aspects of the film:

For the animation, over 5400 photographs were shot, using a Canon 40D with Canon EF-S 10-22 F3.5-5.6 USM and Canon 24-105 F4 L USM lenses. For the indoors scenes I used three 250 watts Hensel Flash triggered with Pocket Wizzards. The camera was controlled through a MacBook laptop using the Canon EOS Utility and a long USB cable.

Credits:
Written, directed, photographed and edited by Dragos Bardac ( http://dragos.bardac.net )
Starring Ovidiu Naclad
Art director: Sebastian Oprita
Photoshop collage: Vlad Jerca
Credits soundtrack: Radu Oprea
Thanks to Florin Costache
Music Life Buoy by The Pixels ( http://www.thepixels.ro )