IAFilm Productions

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"The House of Seville"

Watch "The House of Seville" on Youtube

An animated mock horror movie based partly on "Carmen"

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

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"