Kamo High School students Carne Soper, Alex Clendon, Sean Pivac and Josh Head. Photo / Tania Whyte
Kamo High School students Carne Soper, Alex Clendon, Sean Pivac and Josh Head. Photo / Tania Whyte
Two terms of hard work have paid off for four Kamo High School students after their animated short film won big at an Australasian film festival.
Change is Now, a short film production by Year 13 students Carne Soper, Sean Pivac, Josh Head and Alex Clendon is a compelling animated story about pollution and destruction of the natural environment with a bit of Kiwi flavour.
Judges at the Re-Generation International Short Film Competition were blown away and voted it the best film in the animation category.
Kamo High was the only New Zealand school to make it past the semifinals.
Teacher Mark Turton says the boys had put "a huge amount of research" into the project.
Sean said they repurposed a class project the group had been working on – a legacy film for their school iwi Kaha, which told the story of Kupe and his journey to Aotearoa.
They adjusted the scenes to the topic of the Re-Generation film competition which was sustainability.
The four students learned to sculpt landscapes, figures and objects on 3D computer graphics software Blender – a skill that they had to teach themselves.
Because software Blender is open-source, the programme is popular across the globe providing lots of online learning material for the boys.
"Every asset that you see in the animation has been individually created," Turton explained.
Alex added, "Pretty much all of us had to learn these new resources very quickly".
The boys put a lot of overtime into their project, including after school and during holidays.
To perfect the humans featured in the animation, Sean digitally sculpted one head per day for two weeks until he was satisfied with the design.
Aside from Covid illness, the biggest challenge was the rendering - the process of getting the final assembled animation scenes in a sequence of individual frames which usually requires high processing power.
To render a 10-second clip of Change is Now the school computers had to work for about 11.5 hours.
It was a nerve wracking waiting game for the boys and results weren't always as hoped.
But luckily, the Kamo High IT room had an upgrade which helped the film project along.
Sean said he enjoyed working on the animation "because it was different than normal school work".
"I learned new skills which allow me to express my creativity," Alex added.
Most of the boys are looking at studying computer or art-related subjects after finishing their final year of high school.
Turton said they had kept everything "pretty in-house", not revealing too much about their project until the film was finished and the competition won.
"Everyone was blown away" when they finally screened the film for the rest of the school, he said.
The inaugural Re-Generation International Youth Film Fest is a collaboration between the School Broadcasting Network (SBN), LA International Children's Film Festival and the One Earth Film Fest Young Filmmakers Contest in Chicago.
As part of the fest, Adobe ran the Re-Generation International Short Film Competition that was open to students from years 5-12 across Australasia.
One of the international judges, Dan Bennett said the "fascinating visuals [of Change is Now] are quite effective and emotionally powerful".
"This film is a great achievement, and really hits home the message that we need to change how we interact with the planet," young filmmaker and animator Julia Madeleine Stella commented.
"Some more ways that people can start changing or inspire change in others would have been good to see. The visuals were wonderful, well done on tackling such a difficult medium."
