PLAYGROUNDS

PLAYGROUNDS is a short film from SuperBlimp that travels back to the early '90s, into a child's bedroom deep in the suburbs, where absent parents and forgotten kids escape to imagined worlds the real one can't reach. The film treats nostalgia as something dark rather than something warm, building a place that feels expansive and uncanny and slightly wrong, the way childhood spaces feel when we return to them as adults.

PLAYGROUNDS was developed and made in-house at SuperBlimp and went on to a substantial international festival run, with awards, selections, and press features across the animation circuit.

Press

NVIDIA Blog // Floating on Creativity

UK Film Review // Playgrounds short film review

Directors Notes // SuperBlimp use 80s/90s Nostalgia to Explore Themes of Loneliness and Escapism in CGI Short ‘Playgrounds’

Retrospective Of Jupiter // Try, Fail & Repeat, Playgrounds Interview

Kotatu // Playgrounds is a Cool Short About Growing Up Gaming in the 90s

Genesis

We created PLAYGROUNDS out of a desire to dig back into memories from the ’80s and ’90s. Nostalgia is usually associated with warmth and positivity, but we wanted to bring something darker, an undercurrent of the real world that childhood escapism is often built around. We reflected that in the bedroom itself and in the toys the kids play with.

We’ve all experienced the strange feeling of going back to the road we grew up on and finding that everything is smaller than we remembered. Our nostalgic brains always deceive us with memories of scale. So it felt natural that the bedroom in the film should feel expansive, with the plastic toy soldiers serving as our point of view, the whole room turned into something closer to a funfair at night than a traditional kid’s bedroom.

Process

Working on PLAYGROUNDS let us develop new workflows while applying what we’d learned from years of working across interactive, commercial, and feature film VFX production, fusing those approaches into a kind of guerrilla CGI pipeline. The process video below takes a look behind the scenes at some of the workflows and decisions that went into making the film.

Pre-Production

This needed to the underdog’s bedroom, choosing Sega rather than Nintendo, and anime rather than Disney, for example. The setting would be the late summer of 1994, west coast America. We felt strongly that with American culture permeating British & Italian culture in such a powerful way, it was almost as if, this fictional bedroom we devised was the place we wanted to escape to as children. We brought together many references, always with the ‘Underdog’ theme in mind.

Previz

The Previz provided us with the structure and direction for the final film, from the beginning, the core concept of the parents arguing, and the younger sibling coming in to play with the older brother was there from the very first previz, which was our thematic anchor throughout. The Environment was roughly blocked out, which gave us a scene I could then use to set up all the cameras and would, in turn, be used as a guide for layout when moving to asset production. Like a virtual cameraman, I could then go into the room and look for moments and shots that worked from a purely cinematic and communicative point of view, using placeholders while we developed the narrative.

Production

Post-Production

We wanted to keep the compositing phase as lean as possible, relying on our raw renders to be close to our vision as we could, for the main bulk of the compositing we used Foundry Nuke, where we would add colour grading, glows, depth of field blur, lens distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, lens flares and film grain to help us get the dreamy cinematic look we were looking for, with such a powerful tool, it made the whole process a dream.

Using multi-channel 16bit EXRs we were able to include some very useful passes such as the cryptomatte pass which allowed us to create mattes as and when we needed them inside of Nuke, this gave us many options in post, an example below is for the glow coming from the crack in the door, showing the raw render, matte selection and Glow added afterwards.

Final Frames

Posters

Original poster artwork and social media key visuals created for the film’s release.

Credits

Project: PLAYGROUNDS · Year: 2019

SuperBlimp’s role: Original short. Direction, production, design, CG, animation, editing, sound, and finish, in-house.

Directed by: Antonio Milo, Fabrizio Fioretti

Lead Direction, Animation, Editing, Sound Design: Antonio Milo

Art Direction and Look: Fabrizio Fioretti

CG Artists: Antonio Milo, Fabrizio Fioretti, Francesco Buttarelli

Additional Artists: Alessandro Righi, Emanuele Sernicchi

Music “Sum of All Things” by Gavin Luke · Additional arrangements and sound design by John Wells · “Stemmersoft” written and produced by John Wells

Awards and Selections

PLAYGROUNDS had a substantial international festival run, picking up awards, selections, and recognition across the animation circuit:

AWARD WINNER, Best Director Super Short Film, Florence Film Awards, ITALY
AWARD WINNER, Best Under 5 Min Film, Oniros Film Awards, ITALY
AWARD WINNER, Best Animation, Feel The Reel International Film Festival, UK
AWARD WINNER, Director To Watch, St. Lawrence International Film Festival, USA
AWARD WINNER, Best Animation, Milan Film Awards, ITALY
SPECIAL MENTION, Global Shorts, USA
SEMI-FINALIST, SHORT to the Point, Romania
Honourable Mention, Super Short Film, New York Movie Awards, USA
Daily Short Picks, Film Shortage, CANADA
Official Selection, Directors Notes, UK
Official Selection, LIFTOFF Global Network, USA
Official Selection, Retrospective Of Jupiter
Official Selection, Feel The Reel International Film Festival
Official Selection, British Animation Awards, Public Choice, UK
Official Selection, TMFF The Monthly Film Festival, UK
Official Selection, South Texas Underground Film Festival, USA
Official Selection, Swindon Independent Film Fest, UK
Honourable Mention, London X4 Seasonal Short Film Festival, UK
Honourable Mention, Kosice International Monthly Film Festival, Slovakia