A new CG animated short project called Mute, about a world populated by people who have no mouths, has been generating a lot of buzz within the toon community lately thanks to a strong online presence. Mute was produced by the young Dutch animation studio Job, Joris & Marieke (jobjorisenmarieke.nl/mute), which was founded in 2007 by former design students Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins and Marieke Blauw. Joris Oprins shares more information about the project and its rise to prominence with Animation Magazine‘s European correspondent:
Peter Schavemaker: How was the online buzz created?
Joris Oprins: The Dutch record label Top Notch, the owner of the website WeTranfer.com, and our English agent liked Mute and gave us some starting promo, afterwards it landed on different other online platforms.
What happened next?
It was shown at the Budapest and Paris film festivals. It premiered at the Dutch film festival and will be shown at the animation festival KLIK in Amsterdam, held from November 12-17.
How was the animation created?
It was made in Cinema 4D, using 2D and 3D for the simple character designs and detailed finishing with After Effects. Mute consists of only three main characters, but with different facial expressions, which made a total of 50 different characters to add to complete the population.
What inspired these characters?
That’s a weird and funny story. A while ago, I cut my toe hard while I was swimming. It looked a little bit like a mouth. Later we got the idea to create a character of it.
Who are your animation idols?
We very much like the London-based Studio AKA (www.studioaka.co.uk) and New York-based Buck (www.buck.tv).
How much did Mute cost to produce?
About 7,500 Euro ($10,350 USD), which was financed by the Dutch city of Utrecht, and we have invested our own money we earned with commercial animation work, like working on animated music videos. All three of us worked on it for two months.
Roggeveen, Oprins and Blauw are full time animators working together on all animation disciplines, also composing the music scores of their projects.
