"The House of Seville"

An animated mock horror movie based partly on "Carmen"

When the equinox lines up with a lunar eclipse, there is magic empowering ghosts to cross to the opposite side of the Earth. The Ghost of Carmen leaves her usual haunt of Seville, Spain to descend on Henderson, New Zealand for a night of grandly operatic horror and mayhem as she manipulates the people there into reenacting her own dramatic violent death. Logical and sensible businesswoman Victoria drives through Henderson playing "Carmen" on her car stereo and runs out of petrol. Her cellphone is out of credit. Boutique shopping center "The House of Seville" has its lights ablaze and looks welcoming. Don't go there, Victoria!

Bronwyn, lead scriptwriter, read somewhere that a writer should keep a pen and paper at her bedside to write down any dreams while fresh in her mind. One night she dreamed of a murder in an eccentric building with eccentric occupants and wrote it up as a story. I thought the love triangle murder was like the one in "Carmen" and we worked with that as a script. Add years of animating and - voila! This movie!
More storytelling from Bronwyn at:
https://iafilm.co.nz/mw.html

"DAZ3D" digital artwork software offers some interesting movie-making alternatives and possibilities eg operating like a virtual puppet theater. We explored and developed these by taking on the challenge of animating a drama with recognizably human characters in a contemporary setting. We believe this was "cutting edge" for its time, especially for an indie project by educators and students. Four of us doing the animation over 2008-2011 recorded 1000 person hours for about 1000 seconds of movie.

At Philafilm 2012, The Philadelphia International Film Festival, "The House of Seville" won the Leigh Whipper Gold Award for best Animation.

This 2021 version for public viewing on Youtube has mostly audio re-editing. We have replaced production library music with world class "Carmen" recordings courtesy of Naxos. Big thanks to Naxos for making our music licensing fast, friendly, flexible and of reasonable cost. We recommend Naxos!
https://www.naxoslicensing.com/#/contact/

The Credits - more details:

freesound.org - sound effects attributions

"Cordless phone ring.wav" by cbakos
https://freesound.org/s/50646/
Licensed under CCBY

"fetap-pickup.wav" by DrNI
https://freesound.org/s/164034/
Licensed under CC0

"fetap-hangup.wav" by DrNI
https://freesound.org/s/164035/
Licensed under CC0

"Thunderstorm lightning strike" by foad
https://freesound.org/s/243614/
Licensed under CC0

This movie makes use of the Carnegie Mellon University Graphics Lab MOCAP Database - available at:
http://mocap.cs.cmu.edu/
The database was created with funding from NSA EIA-0196217

More about "Carmen":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen
"Carmen" (1875) is an opera by composer Georges Bizet with libretto (text) by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy. It is based on Prosper Mérimée's novella "Carmen" (1845). Here is a link to a 1997 Paris-Bastille Opera production cued to start at the murder scene:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zTDMvyj4TFg&t=9032

More about the movie "making of":
Animation 3D Diary starting with "Characters"

Removing the Age Restriction on "The House of Seville"

A new year 2022. Looking at new official trailers I see lots of blood without age restrictions. The "blood-based" age restriction was always a borderline decision. It is now looking more and more like excessive caution. I am therefore removing the restriction and I am going with the less obtrusive algorithm-managed rating "not made for kids".

Previously:
Why does "The House of Seville" have a Youtube Age Restriction?

Posting "The House of Seville" on Youtube for public viewing raised a question of audience rating. Our movie has animated violence with a murder scene based on the "Carmen" story. In our discussions we thought it was a low level issue and we should use the Youtube upload option "not made for kids". However when I did the upload and carefully read the Youtube guide notes I made the call to "play it safe" and go "age restricted".

We work with a storytelling trope that ghosts are obsessed with causing the living to reenact their deaths. Here, the ghost of Carmen takes control of Ray and causes him to kill Daria with a sword. The critical items from the Youtube checklist are (1) the audience can see blood and (2) the editing and animated camera point of view highlight the blood beyond incidental detail. This is balanced by a non-realistic animated depiction.

Blood is a major rating element. I went through an exercise of reviewing Youtube scenes of violence and other content that could be challenging for sensitive viewers. These were mostly trailers for horror movies as well as examples like "1917", "Dunkirk" and "Gladiator". Challenging yes, with many life-at-risk tension moments, but mostly contrived to be bloodless. It was very difficult to find any example clip that showed blood. It appears that a convention has developed that bloodless violence is OK. Reflecting on that I agree that blood is an issue and I should restrict a film that depicts it. However, how OK is it to have wide audiences for otherwise realistic violence without blood? Advances in movie tech are making bloodless violence more intense. We are seeing entertainment violence that is missing violence realities like long term pain and suffering: including a lifetime of guilt and remorse for the perpetrators after a moment of impulse. Blood is a truth of violence. And film-makers should tell the truth. To age-restricted audiences rather than using the bloodless excuse to market violence to a wider audience.

Watch "The House of Seville" on Youtube

Watch the Murder Scene as discussed here