Behind the scenes of THE KITE / Part 2 / Scenography

The second episode of documentary series about making of a short animated film The Kite by Martin Smatana.

To show the process of getting thinner, we decided to build puppets out of layers. The boy has many of these layers; he is three-dimensional and has perspective, because he has all his life in front of him. As the grandpa gets older, he also gets thinner, and at the end of his life he is as thin as a sheet of paper, so one day the wind just softly blows him and takes him up to the sky.

While building the scenography, we came up with the rule that objects which have a solid surface in the real world – like a road, bus or house – would be made out of paper, and we will draw naive children’s drawings on it. And objects which are soft in the real world – like clouds, smoke, grass or snow – we will make out of soft textile materials, to be able to express the wind, which is almost the third character in the film.

As boy sometimes flies high in the clouds, he sees little fields from above. We made them look like a patchwork blanket, because when I used to visit my grandparents during the summer holiday as a kid, they had this patchwork blanket, and I used to sleep under it.

During the building of the sets, we visited probably every second-hand shop in Prague. We bought a lot of cheap clothes with different patterns and colors to be used in the film, because there are four different seasons in the entire film, and each has its own color palette. Also a lot of our friends donated their old clothes to the film, so we could re-use them instead of throwing it to trash can.

Half of the sets we made in Prague at the Academy of Arts; the other half was made in studio CeTA in Wroclaw, Poland, where we later shooted the film.

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