Hello, I'm Carlos Smith, I'm the director of the short film Lenses. I'm from Colombia, now I'm living in Costa Rica where I'm the academic director of the animation school of the Vieritas University. And okay, let's start. My show is about the lies that we do not tell about reality. But not only about the lies that we put in front of reality, that surround us, but about the life that we tell ourselves about ourselves. life that will tell ourselves about ourselves. I was reading a science fiction novel by Stanislas Blain called the Futurally Congress. I loved that idea of liars and liars of false reality that through psychotropics convinced the population to life in a kind of perfect world. I started to imagine then what would happen if we had something to say, a way to say beyond the obvious. That is lenses. that is lenses. Okay, the hardest thing about this production really was making the time to finish it. This project started almost 20 years ago. I started and I had to stop when it was almost finished. And then life got in my way. I signed my country, I started another career, I had children, and every time I tried to resume the project something new happened. Finally, with the support of Lola Barreto, my producer, and a grandfather from the government, I was able to sit down to finish it. Okay, it's interesting that I had a team that worked in the 90s and other people who helped me in the final stage a couple of years ago. The project started on paper and pencil and ended in digital tables. It was very interesting because some of the old people, the original people working in the last stage and they work now with digital tablets and some of the new people want to try to work with paper and pencil and there are that kind of crazy mix in the film. If I could start over again with this project, with another project, I would try to start and finish the project in one season. It's very, very difficult to get back to something when you have closed it. Sometimes you just have to make the last force to have something finished. It's slow to drag an unfinished project for years and years and years. It's like having a handicap in your back. Then I would try to finish the project in one season, only one season. I have learned that. A lot of things happened during the production, basically life passes. only got seasoned. I have learned that. A lot of things happened during the production basically life passes but I remember a lot when I finally decided to finish it and I had to transport thousands and thousands of paper already drawn back to Colombia from Spain. It was like carrying a dead man. It was more than 75 kilos. I always like to write stories but when I had to decide what to study, a friend to study, a friend convinced me to try advertising. I really hated it. But in that career there were some subjects, some areas that I liked and all of them were related with the visual producer. Then I decided to make a change and start to study direction, film direction. At that time I know I like animation but there there was nowhere to start animation in Colombia. So while I was studying film during, while I studied film I started to make my own projects in animation. That's the way I learned. Ok, for me short films is a genre in itself, especially in animation. There are great, great directors, many of the masters of this art, who only make short films like Chuck Jones, Joana Quinn, Norman McLaren, Stanevich, and a lot of more. But if your goal is to make a feature film, oh, you must necessarily start with shorter format because making a feature film is too expensive to make tests in that area. I think the short film that has to do with its direction. This condition, the conditioning, the complexity of the script, the pressure of the narrative, and the rhythm of the montage. But the bigger condition, the bigger difference is the freedom. Where you are making a short film, you have a lot of freedom. You can make what you want. Because you are not conditioned by the budget. You can be more experimental. You can be more intimate if you want. It's not a big deal. It's not, you are not working for business when you make a short film. I guess you can set short film are made by directors and feature films are made by producers. y los filmes futuros son hechos por los producentes. Apenas ahora estoy trabajando en Colombia en dos series de televisión internacional y estoy terminando este año, en diciembre, mi primer filme futuro. my first feature film. Not as director, but as producer. It's a science fiction film called The Other Shape. It's about a dystopic world where people want to be like a square. A character that wants to be a square like everybody, but he starts to understand that maybe it's not too important to be like the other people. And he tries during the film to find his own form, the other shape. And I hope that next year start the pre-production of a new feature film. My first as director, called For a Bowl of Soap. It's a kind of musical thriller about murders in seafood restaurants. I guess animation is one of the areas that have managed better the COVID-19 crisis because animators used to work from home, we used to work online. It's very normal work alone with a computer, with a digital table, it's enough to work. We are working actually, we are working more this year than last year, we are working more. But of course we need to see each other again, we need to touch each other again. I hope it's finished soon. Hello, lovely Linz International Short Film Festival. My name is Reinhold Biedner, I'm the director and animator of the animated short film Time O' the Signs. And I'm trying now to answer some of the questions that you sent me concerning my film. Well, about the theme, it is about those social media stupidities that we all live with currently, you know, like digital isolation, surveillance, fake news, etc., etc., and it happened, you know, I have been teaching in a course at Linz Art University, which was called Web Art and Web Sciences, and in that course I asked students to think about those topics. And yeah, sooner or later I started as well to doodle some of my ideas concerning that topic and they ended up in my sketchbook. So sooner or later I thought, hey, it would be nice to to create a film an animated short film out of this and yeah one of the challenges was of course to put those quite you know those those quite versatile fragments together at the end and maybe it's good to say it is a piece that was created or finalized shortly before the pandemic so I would say I'm still not sure if this makes the film better or worse in these pandemic times right now. Maybe you can tell me. What is your biggest challenge? other people you know we have a collective called Gold Extra which is based in Vienna and Salzburg and they usually help me a lot also in these endeavors and on the other hand we create you know like media you know documentaries documentary games theater pieces so this is a collective that exists since many years and yeah I'm quite happy that they support me with these things as well. Or to name just two more people, Florian Berger who helped out with some of the sort of background designs in the sense of he's a very good programmer and shader programmer, I mean he's the god in shader programming and he's based in Linz. And Wobblersound from Vienna that you know like at the end said hey the sound that you created is so nice maybe we can stick with this one. And you know like Wobblersound then rather tried to to make it better in the sense of sound quality and in the sense of balancing and mastering etc. So yeah, as you can hear, I guess a lot was created by myself. What do you think about the future of the game? and you know, rather problematic months are going to come as it seems. I see it a bit different. I think in a normal year, I rather had the luxury to lock myself up and the luxury to, you know, like whenever I didn't want to lock myself up, to go out and to do everything. And now it's a bit more, yeah, the unfortunate or tragic necessity to lock myself up. Yeah, just one sentence about that. And yeah, of course there's future projects, but I think the time is already over to talk about them, but they will be very different again than this film that you are going to see. They are rather in the documentary, but also in the animation section, and also of course documentary and game projects related to our collective Gold Extra. So yes, at the end, thanks for the invitation of my film. It's great that you also incorporate animation in your festival because it's not the easiest field in Austria. So thanks a lot for that. Have fun, good luck for the organization and hopefully see you soon in real!