A little conversation with Flora...

In March 2020, when the government of Italy imposed a national quarantine in response to the growing pandemic of COVID-19 in the country, none of us were prepared for what was happening. Events happened at an unsustainable speed. Everyone tried in their own way to react to what was going on. Everyone tried to give themselves answers that no one seemed to have. The aim was to maintain sanity. If we lost sanity, we also lost the ability to protect the people around us. My way of looking for answers was to start a survey. I started it on March 21, 2020. The survey consisted of 12 questions of different types, some of a general nature and others more specific, all relating to the quarantine experience. I asked people to open up about how the situation in the country made them feel, and I was surprised by the answers. I think some people have taken it as a chance to blow off steam. At first, I was able to recognize the answers of my friends, relatives... after only a few hours I started seeing answers from places in Italy where I didn't know anyone. I managed to collect the responses of 398 people from all over the country.

Some people have written of being concerned about those around them. Someone wrote of having attempted suicide earlier in life and being afraid that this situation would lead them to the point of doing it again. Other people spoke about wanting to go home, wanting to end a relationship, wanting to leave their job and change their life. A friend of mine did it when the situation of the country got better. She left everything and joined the man she loves on the other side of the country. They will get married soon.

One answer in particular, on March 22, broke my heart when I read it. The question was: "If you could choose a moment during this quarantine that you consider most significant in representing your state of mind, which one would you choose? What emotion did you feel? Was it caused by something in particular? ”. The answer that this person gave was, "My mom is a doctor and she made sure I knew how to get access to her life insurance premium. I cried for two hours". When I read it, it hit me all at once: we had to be ready to let go of a generation, of people we loved, and most of us could do nothing about it, except staying home and away from trouble.

When the first lockdown ended, while I was helping my parents in the summer family business here in Sardinia, I kept talking to guests who came from all over Italy. A man who lived in Lombardy told me how his father was diagnosed, hospitalized, and he could no longer see him. The father then died. Unfortunately, there are thousands of stories like this one. Through this short film, Fabrizio and I tried to tell the facts and share the emotion and feelings, trying to bring together our own stories and all the stories that Italians have told us during these months.

A little conversation with Fabrizio Di Palma...

In designing the animated short film “Q” we wanted to combine the versatility and flexibility of 3D animation with the expressiveness and visual impact of 2D animation. Over the years, 3D animation has undergone a natural process of style homologation due to the technical limitations of this technology, which studios have tried to cope with through an increasingly careful search for super realism. However, 3D animation also gives access to the ability to move the camera in real time in space, easily change the angle of the frame and the focal length of the virtual lens. It also gives you the ability to play with the lights in real time and change lighting very quickly. It therefore unlocks a much more cinematic approach with new potential.
However, the 2D animation approach leaves much more room for creativity, design and style, thus making it possible to adopt new, distinct and characteristic aesthetics. In “Q” we therefore combined the two worlds to exploit the maximum potential of both. We have created a work pipeline and implemented some techniques in order to obtain the flexibility of 3D, the expressiveness of 2D and combine them in a new visual language. Starting from the character design we designed the characters looking for a level of synthesis typical of 2D but keeping in mind the limits of digital modeling. We also identified the traits and aspects that we would have kept in the finished product such as the type of coloring, the outline, the sign and the typical lines of the illustration.