The film is the graduating project of Tomer Eshed, a 33-year-old student at the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film and Television (HFF) in Potsdam-Babelsberg. It was made at Talking Animals, the animation studio founded by HFF graduates. In his final film at the HFF, Eshed wanted to explore the major theme of human beings’ deep need for acceptance. Out of a number of different possibilities, he ultimately decided on having a flamingo as the hero of an unusual story. Indeed, only with heroes such as these is it possible to present this difficult material in an entertaining way.

A Biting and Humorous Portrait of Society

“Flamingo Pride” is a portrait of society and makes use of widespread clichés to tackle pervasive problems such as intolerance and blind uniformity. The hero must resist not only the suspicions of the narrow-minded members of his beloved stork’s group but also those of his own colony, the members of which who, in spite of their multicoloured diversity, are not able to see beyond their own noses. It was clear to Eshed from the beginning that such a complex theme could only be told with humour: “Even if the theme is fundamentally a serious one, I believe that humour can reach people better than direct confrontation”.

At the same time, it was clear to the filmmakers from the very beginning that telling a story with birds as the main characters would be technically demanding and entail a long production period – a tremendous challenge for the entire team. This is yet another reason why Eshed, together with his co-author Tristian Taylor, decided on a funny story: “I hoped that if we were able to have fun making the film, that somehow audiences would get a sense of that when they saw it”.

Eshed already knew the team from his work on his previous film “Our Wonderful Nature”, in which two love-sick water shrews fight in a martial-arts style against each other for the favours of a lady shrew mouse. But, because this time the production would be substantially larger, Eshed recruited not only people from “Talking Animals” but also a number of other talented individuals associated with the small animation studio. The success of the award-winning “Our Wonderful Nature”, which went viral on the Internet, no doubt played a role in this.  

Feathers, Fur and Water

The technical challenges involved in making “Flamingo Pride” were found primarily in the materials. The believable depiction of birds’ feathers and reflections in water require very special solutions. Above all, it was production elements such as mass simulation and the execution of stereo-3D that were new for Eshed and the team at “Talking Animals”. This made the journey to satisfying results often quite difficult. And, considering the limited budget, the goal was to integrate the steps that often involved intensive processing power as efficiently with one another so that they didn’t exceed the available resources.

For the first rough conception, the team used Story Board Pro, and for the opening sequence the camera tracking was developed using Motion Builder. The team used Maya for the animation. The models were created either using Mudbox or ZBrush and the team created the textures using Photoshop. For the particle simulations, the team used Massive; Realflow helped with the realistic and close-up simulation of the water. The feathers were created using Houdini; the tiger fur using Shave and a Haircut. The shading pipeline was developed parallel to the modelling and animation. The final rendering was done using Renderman. The foreground and background were rendered separately so as to have more control and to avoid cardboarding and other problems connected to stereoscopic 3D representation. The team used Nuke for the compositing.

Final Cut was used for the editing and the final touch was given by Adobe After Effects. The final project premiered in 2011 and, like Eshed’s previous project, was received very enthusiastically at a number of film festivals. It received an award at the renowned Siggraph Computer Animation Festival in Vancouver, Canada, and in June received the audience prize at the Hamburg Animation Awards. The animago AWARD for Best Short Film now rounds out the film’s many well-deserved accolades.

About Tomer Eshed

“Flamingo Pride” is Tomer Eshed’s graduating project at the Konrad Wolf Academy of Film and Television (HFF). The young director started studying at the HFF in 2004 while also working at the same time at “Talking Animals”, an animation studio founded by HFF graduates. Eshed’s residency permit expired when he completed his studies and he has now returned to Israel, where he has no concrete plans for the future except that he intends to remain active in the field of animation as a director.