editors
JERRY BECK (LA)
AMID AMIDI (NY)
“Aqua” by Gints Zilbalodis
February 9, 2012 12:05 am


Aqua is quite a sophisticated piece of visual storytelling for a 17 year-old. Created with Toon Boom Animate Pro, After Effects and Photoshop, this has been a passion project for teenager Gints Zilbalodis for the last year and a half. Says Zilbalodis:

“It started as vague ideas of a cat, ocean and overcoming fear. Then through numerous battles with the script it shaped up to something similar you can see now. After seven drafts I felt that it was ready to start storyboarding, but the film kept evolving all the way until the sound mix was done. I kept learning about filmmaking everyday, going through all of the different processes.

“I chose the cat as the main character mainly to save time with exposition, because people know that generally cats are afraid of water. So I could just jump right into action. Plus cat is a fairly small creature and the ocean seems even bigger to him. And of course cats are much easier to draw than humans.

“The film’s music is by my friend Bertrams Pauls Purvišķis who helped a great deal to tell the story the way it was intended. Music had a lot of to convey in very little time and it came out much better than I could’ve ever expected”.

Ryan says:
02/9/12  12:48am

Kids these days! More power to them!
Hope there are enough studios to build the wave of awesome artists who are currently upon us.

 
Tony C says:
02/9/12  1:41am

Excellent work.

 
Gints Zilbalodis says:
02/9/12  4:26am

Thank you so much Jerry! It’s an honor to be featured here!

 
Jamie says:
02/9/12  4:42am

Quite a sophisticated piece of visual storytelling for anyone. Great work!

 
edward says:
02/9/12  1:01pm

great job gints. you have a bright future ahead of you. glad to see technology giving such opportunities to so many aspiring artists! and thanks for covering this amid! this is why i come to cartoon brew!!!

 
nick says:
02/9/12  3:51pm

Very well animated and nice sense of timing!

 
Oscar Grillo says:
02/9/12  8:35pm

Just brilliant!!!

 
A Painter says:
02/9/12  8:58pm
 
Stav Levi (croovman) says:
02/10/12  1:40am

Amazing, touching, accurate. Bravo.
Keep acting on your dreams.

 
Extremely impressed and very jealous 27yo says:
02/11/12  7:00am

It’s…it’s aaallllright….*swig*

 
Oliver Acker says:
02/11/12  11:31pm

Love it..! A very charming and engaging piece of animation. Looking forward to see more =)

 
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