Bye bye

5 mins 30 sec animated film, produced by Bringas in collaboration with Liana Dognini as director. The film sought to create an aesthetic which avoided the spectacular, producing instead a form of realist drama which explored in quiet detail a significant moment of country life, telling the story of a girl who is taught to drown unwanted kittens. Bye Bye was commissioned by Channel Four (£55K) as part of Museum of the Moving Image Animator in Residence scheme.

Following its broadcast on C4 (2002), and on CBC (2003), Bye Bye released in independent cinemas (Phoenix and Ritzy,

London), and toured international festivals, including Amsterdam, Annecy, Clermont-Ferrand, Rotterdam, Tokyo. It won Grand

Jury Prize: Castelli Animati Film Festival, Rome, (2002), and was nominated for Cartoon D’Or (2003).

The style is hybrid: both photographic and drawn, the film asks audiences to sway between the ‘truthful quality’ of drawn

animation and the stillness and artifice of photographic material, to read the film with both the distance that animation inherently

provides and the immediacy of the photographic image.

Production processes were kept flexible, as substantial experimentation was required to develop the film’s visual style.

Considerable visual and technical research went into testing different styles (of drawing, and of compositing) that could both

include and challenge the hyper-realisms associated with classical cartoon expression. Bringas conceived the workflow for

seamlessly combining digitally photographic and drawn elements.

As the storyline itself avoided a classical arc, each stage of production and post-production was also kept open to change, to

achieve the subtle balance between narrative and visual atmosphere. The small production team allowed flexibility and fluidity of

creative processes. Dognini and Bringas gathered photographic materials - landscapes of the Po Valley, textures, etc - and

shared management of digital processes. Over a ten month production period, each frame was produced at high resolution in

order to be transferred directly from digital files onto 35 mm film, using the relatively new Cineon technology.

Bringas works collaboratively with her directors, with ongoing dialogue about all creative decisions, and has established herself

internationally as a leading producer of innovative animation.