The Études, Fantasia and the magic of musical education

How we hope The Études can help introduce children to the magic of classical music...

A still from Chopin's Drawings by Dorota Kobiela, set to
Chopin's Opus 25, No 2

Music education in the UK is something BreakThru feels very strongly about. Ensuring that children are fired up about the magic of music is one of the driving forces behind the Études project, in which the music of Chopin's elegant piano studies is paired up with a virtuoso animation, and we are currently exploring a variety of ways to aid teachers in the classroom and parents at home to reach out to their children's musical potential.

The Études are 27 short piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin intended to both advance a new technical form of playing (Études translates as 'studies') as well as offering pleasure and variety in their own right. BreakThru Films founder Hugh Welchman became interested in their potential during his immersion in the world of Prokofiev during the production of Peter and the Wolf. Their beauty and the range of emotions they conjure made them the perfect fit for Welchman's desire to create a varied body of cutting-edge animations in a variety of differing mediums. Each of Chopin's pieces is a challenging task for any pianist, and BreakThru sought to work with visual artists and animators who were themselves challenging and pushing formal boundaries.

The minimalist madness of Anne-Kristin Berge's Pl.Ink,
 set to Opus 10, No 4

The Études can be viewed separately, as each tells an individual story, or as a set, as many of the individual films share aesthetic or thematic elements in common. They are intended to appeal to children, containing bright colours, attractive characters and constant movement and rhythm, but also to resonate with adults. Scarecrow tells the pathos-filled story of a soldier's death in Poland's November Revolution, while Chopin's Drawings gives us an insight into the composer's incredible childhood through moving sketches which emerge and blend through his elegant musical notation. As with Peter and the Wolf the Études seek to offer an engaging and fulfilling experience for audiences of all ages. Pl.Ink and Fat Hamster both use vibrant physical comedy to tell simple stories which capture the frenetic and energetic tone of the music. They show that classical music does not merely have to be beautiful and life-affirming, but that it can also be playful and genuinely comic.

Fat Hamster by Adam Wyrwas,
set to Opus 25, No 8

The clear ancestor of the Études is Walt Disney's ground-breaking Fantasia, produced in 1940, in a world which was scarcely ready to accept the collision of animation and classical music. As Disney historian Hugh Trimble eloquently argues in his blog, this was also perceived as a clash of low and high culture. Fantasia is set within a mythical theatre, where the 'greatest hits' of classical music are presented in a variety of animated settings and styles. It was intended as a showcase for Disney's multi-talented animators, but also to promote his conviction that the worlds of music and animation were never far apart. Disney had been producing his 'Silly Symphonies' for 12 years, and indeed Fantasia started life as one such vignette, the now famous 'Sorcerer's Apprentice' sequence. Fantasia demonstrated that like classical music animation could take a simple motif or idea, and owing to the elasticity of the form, twist it into surprising or inspiring narratives.

Mickey as Paul Dukas' 'Sorcerer's Apprentice'
in Disney's Fantasia (1940)

Owing to the popularity of Fantasia since its release, and most particularly the life its short segments found on television as regular components of the studio's popular 'Disney Time', it has offered generations of children their introduction to classical music. Mickey's antics have demonstrated that classical music does not have to be dry or dusty, that it does not require a musical education but rather inspires one, and we hope that the Études project can provide similar inspiration for a new generation of musicians and music lovers.

- Stewart Pringle

Pirates!, Aardman and the power of mixed-media animation

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is well on its way to being a box-office smash, and shows the brilliant Aardman Animation at their very best, but it's also a significant technical triumph, and a great demonstration of the strength of blending classic stop-motion techniques with cutting edge computer technology.

The Pirate Captain prepares to board...

Filled with the dry wit, hilarious visual gags and good-hearted adventure that has made Aardman Britain's leading animation studio, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists was released in the UK last week, and looks sure to be as much of a hit with audiences as with critics. Based on the first of a series of comic novels by Gideon Defoe (hence it's idiosyncratic title, which would sit much more comfortably on a bookshelf than a cinema hoarding, and which is being changed to the more manageable The Pirates! Band of Misfits for its US release) it also has the potential to become a sizeable franchise.

If it does, then its success will be well-deserved. The Pirates! is a gleeful piece of swashbuckling family entertainment, every frame stuffed with brilliant jokes that demand a second or third viewing and a fantastic cast including a star-turn by Hugh Grant as the hapless Pirate Captain and the incredible Imelda Staunton as a pirate-hating Queen Victoria. It also has a winning script which refuses to talk down to its audience, keeping the parents interested with cameo appearances by the Elephant Man and Jane Austen rather than cheap 'adult' humour.

Perhaps best of all, and easiest to pass over, is its gorgeous animation, which manages to stay true to the stop-motion which made Aardman's name in the 1980's and 90's while providing eye-bursting 3D and seamlessly introducing a variety of computer generated landscapes and effects. 

It's not Aardman's first foray into mixed-media animation: the apparently 'home-spun' Wallace & Gromit in the Cure of the Were-Rabbit involved the participation of leading post-production company MPC Films, who provided a plethora of computer generated bunnies to 'bulk out' those created by Nick Park and his team.

Can you separate the CG bunnies from their plasticine cousins?
I'm not sure we can...

In The Pirates! however, Aardman incorporated mixed-media techniques throughout the animation process. Computer generation was handled in-house, made possible by Aardman's earlier experiments with computer generated animation for their modestly successful all-CG collaboration with Dreamworks, Flushed Away. As so much of Pirate Captain's adventures take place on the water, a famously time-consuming substance to work with in traditional stop-motion, it naturally suggested the full-on incorporation of computer generated visuals. 

The ocean swells, the sweeping vistas of Victorian London and a host of other elements have been rendered digitally rather than in-camera, and it is a credit to the skill of Aardman's team that the effect is never jarring. Aardman have essentially updated an intrinsic principle of animation, in which the background is 'pre-rendered', whether this means painted onto a single surface or onto multiple panes of glass as in many of Disney's most lush environments, while the characters are animated by hand and overlaid. Here it was the motley band of pirates and their (not very sea-worthy) ship that were superimposed over the computer generated environment using green screen.

Animators work to blend the set and characters into the
computer generated ocean environment - here Charles Darwin
is readied to walk the plank into a digital ocean

It doesn't stop there, the animation has also been rendered in highly effective 3D, and contains numerous moments which imitate traditional cell-animation. These include the comic travelling sequences, in which the pirate ship careers around a map, leaving a confused trail of red dots as it ricochets off cherubs and is blown around by baroque zephyrs. The result is a technical palette which pays homage to great animations of the past, contains a visual style which is definitively 'Aardman-esque' (all ping-pong ball eyes and letterbox jaws) while also allowing for spectacular set-pieces. Most importantly of all, the various techniques compliment one another, rather than creating incongruities.

Mixed-media animation is something BreakThru Films feel very strongly about, so we'll be cheering The Pirates! on to success when it opens in the US later this month. Our current projects, and particularly the short animations created for Chopin's Études, have been created with a wide variety of technical processes, blended together to create visually distinctive films which are both aesthetically powerful and technically progressive. The Flying Machine sees live-action blending with computer generated graphics and 3D stop motion animation, continuing a lineage which extends back through Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Mary Poppins and beyond.

Our stop motion animated Flying Machine against
a computer generated vista

We're also very excited about Scarecrow, which has recently been selected for the BeFilm 2012 Underground film festival in New York at the end of this month. It's to be shown in 3D, as intended, and we hope it can demonstrate (as The Pirates! does) that 3D really can be the future of animation, if studios have the confidence to develop their films in true-3D, rather than simply slapping on the effect in post-production to increase box-office revenue. Used effectively, in collaboration with the other animation techniques, it can be spectacularly effective and moving.

Rotoscoping, a technique which has been used since
the birth of animation, gives Scarecrow a real sense
of living history

Scarecrow uses a combination of traditional animation, rotoscoping and 3D computer generated graphics to tell the story of a fallen soldier in Poland's November Revolution. The rotoscope technique allowed the animators to bring the startling paintings of Polish painter Jerzy Duda-Gracz to life, creating an aesthetic that at once stays true to the era Chopin evokes, while at the same time involving the work of one of Poland's most significant modern artists. As the story progresses and the soldier's soul seems to rise up from his broken body, directors Przemyslaw Anusiewicz and Janusz Martyn begin to introduce 3D computer generated elements, strange cloaked figures which dance above the marshland like animated shrouds. Viewed in 3D, it is an effect which simply could not be achieved with traditional animation, a true example of technology making the impossible possible.

Computer generated animation brings a more haunting aspect of
Duda-Gracz's art to life in striking 3D

Whether allowing pirate ships to spring forty feet above a crystal-clear ocean, or bringing a haunting vitality to some of Poland's most beautiful art and music, mixed-media techniques are keeping animation at the cutting edge of film-making. The sense that an animated film can embrace a wide variety of technical forms is one which keeps it fresh and responsive to innovation and creative thinking.  The days in which stop-motion or traditional animation and computer generation were seen as mortal enemies, with the latter poised to consign its frame-by-frame predecesor to the dustbin of history, are thankfully far behind us. At BreakThru we're constantly looking forward to the next advancement, and as Aardman's Pirates! seem poised to storm the US box office, we're proud to be among such illustrious company.

-Stewart Pringle

Follow the BreakThru Films blog for future articles on some of the revolutionary techniques that we;re developing for upcoming projects. Except the ones that are too secret to show you yet...shhh!

The Flying Machine - a multi-platform adventure

BreakThru Films founder and producer of The Flying Machine Hugh Welchman explains that the way we tell stories is changing all the time.

The Flying Machine will be taking off in more than cinemas

Our aim with The Flying Machine is to make a film that will push the boundaries of family animation, and for the range of products across different platforms that we are currently developing to be the first phase of the creation of an enduring franchise. We are in a period of massive change in the way that people are accessing and interacting with stories, music, art and games. Technology is not only changing the way we consume stories, it is changing the way stories are told.

BreakThru Films is all about delivering multiple entertainment and educational experiences across a range of platforms, traditional and new. The combination of cutting edge live action, amazing computer generated visual effects, state‐of‐the‐art 3‐D technology, Chopin’s timeless composing and Lang Lang’s kinetic piano playing, will create a truly moving and entertaining film for families of all ages.

The core iconic element across all delivery platforms is the flying machine itself. In the beginning nothing but a discarded piano, but when children discover it in moments of distress it transforms into something magical ‐ in the vein of Jules Verne and Hayao Miyazaki ‐ and transports them to a world without limits. It is the ultimate adventure den, and it will strike a chord with the imaginative child in each of us.

A metaphor for Chopin’s mesmerising and transporting music, the flying machine, like his music, will traverse Europe and the world. The audio, visual and cultural experience will have a transformative effect on people’s lives; flying into films, games and theatrical shows, onto the pages of books and the screens of mobiles, and into school curriculums. The Flying Machine is so distinctive it will win the hearts and spark the imagination of audiences all over the world.

We are breaking the mould with The Flying Machine. The sheer emotional impact and enjoyment of watching this unique film will make it a classic. Like Disney and Pixar’s most innovative films it is set to charm audiences through the generations.

- Hugh Welchman

'Rig-Zilla' - the monster behind The Flying Machine

Jacek Spychalski, Art director on The Flying Machine (and the man in charge of actually making the flying contraption), talks about his experiences bringing the magical piano to life.

I have had the pleasure of being a part of this project from its very beginning. At that stage, though, I didn’t suspect the venture was going be so huge and that it would totally engross me totally for nearly two years. Working on The Flying Machine was a huge challenge and the flying machine itself was of course a key component of the film and a real troublemaker for its constructors and builders, as well as for the animators who threw life into it.

Lang Lang and Heather Graham aboard The Flying Machine

The biggest technical challenge was animation the flying machine as a puppet. It would have been relatively straight-forward and inexpensive to make and animate the flying machine puppet in computer animation, but there were certain qualities that puppet stop-motion delivers that meant we wanted to pursue this route. Puppet stop motion allows for a much higher level of finishing and detail to the models, and a much more life-like feel, it also has a special quality to its movement, which comes from the fact it is being manipulated by hand. Animating the flying machine in stop motion would make it magical.

Using stop motion rather than computer generated animation
gave Heather and Lang's journey its magical look

Most puppets are under 50cm high, have 4 limbs, not more than 12 joints, are self- supporting and weigh under 500 grams. So now you see the comparison: our first flying machine puppet was 2 metres high, had over 120 joints, each of which needed to be moved for each frame of animation, and 13 wings, and needed to be supported in 15 places and weighed 25 kilos.  This meant that we had to devise a specialist rig (the ‘rig-zilla’), which was 4 metres high, a kind of articulate robot, that could run along two sets of tracks, hold the flying machine exactly still over a metre off the ground, and be adjusted to precisely move the flying machine in any direction.

Rig-Zilla before the cameras

Our animators had to use step-ladders to animate each frame, and out of 18 lead animators only 2 animators learnt how to use this monster of rigs. It was an epic feat of technical production with each shot using rig-zilla, especially as most shots we used it for were complex motion control shots, often we need a to block out a space the size of a tennis court half for these monster shots.

The Flying Machine suspended by Rig-Zilla

When starting the work on The Flying Machine, I didn’t imagine that one of our machines was going to fly from a studio in Łódź to the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden City Concert Hall, and that I was going to fly after it few days later to put it together on the eve of our film’s world premiere. After this long period of hard toil there finally came the time for its fruits to be tasted and for the film’s creators to celebrate the final part of the adventure. It was a great pleasure to see the smiling faces of children watching the film, trying to catch flower petals whirling around them (thanks to our 3D specialists).

- Jacek Spychalski

The Birth of the Flying Machine

Company founder and producer of The Flying Machine, Hugh Welchman, lets us in on the genesis of his magical tribute to Chopin and the power of music.

Anna takes to the skies on The Flying Machine

On 15^th March I flew to Wroclaw, at the invitation of Minister Zdrojewski, to take part in the 60th birthday celebrations of Polish Animation. It was 3 weeks after I had won the Oscar (for Peter and the Wolf) and offers had been flooding in to BreakThru suggesting what BreakThru should do next.

At the end of the evening the Minister said  he had an idea. He proposed that BreakThru would make another half hour animation for families in Poland, featuring the music of Chopin, and to be part of the 200^th Anniversary celebrations of Chopin’s birth in 2010.

During the production of Peter and the Wolf I had decided that I liked working in Poland, and that it could offer a range of interesting possibilities for the future so I set up BreakThru Films Poland in July 2007, and my Polish team kick-started various small scale entrepreneurial ventures. Making an animated film featuring the music of Chopin seemed like an ideal choice to be BreakThru Films Poland’s first big project… I was very interested in his suggestion.

Like most English people my age my knowledge of classical music is very poor. In school music classes we would sing the Beatles, and my parents predilection for classical music made it seem stuffy in my eyes. But producing Peter and the Wolf, which came about because of the fact I was approached by a conductor who was interested in collaborations between film and live orchestra, had opened me up to classical music. I have probably listened to Peter and the Wolf more than anyone on the planet (apart from Peter and the Wolf’s writer and director, Suzie Templeton), and this got me into all of Prokofiev’s repertoire. I knew a lot about Prokofiev and his music, but that was pretty much it…

I knew Chopin by name, probably had heard his pieces at home as a kid (my step-father plays the piano well), but wouldn’t have been able to recognise a single piece of his music. I went out and bought his complete works, shut myself in a room and started listening to his music. I was guided in what I was listening to by my friend and long-time collaborator, Geoff Lindsey, who literally knows more about classical music than anyone on the planet. Certain things struck me immediately:

1. Apart from a couple of piano concertos, Chopin basically wrote short pieces for solo piano, and this is what he was famous for.
2. Chopin didn’t write music to stories; his music was very abstract.

With Peter and the Wolf we had a narrative piece of music; we had characters; we had a well known story. My first reaction was to try and make Chopin into Prokofiev: we would take Chopin’s great tunes and we would orchestrate them, so we could have a big orchestra, and we could create a film that we would accompany with live orchestra, like Peter and the Wolf. I was also mad into break-dancing at the time, I can’t remember why, and decided early on that I wanted the film to be a break-dance film. I just thought that combining Chopin’s tunes with break-dancing would be great.

I put together a working group of my trusted collaborators. Writer Marianela Maldonado and her husband and writing partner, Robin Todd, and writer Geoff Lindsey. They were to be the film’s writers. Marianela and Robin with their wild and wonderful imaginations, tempered by Geoff, the voice of classical music reason. And also in the working group my chosen director’s Martin Clapp and Adam Wrywas. Adam was our lead animator on Peter and the Wolf, a man with wild passion and magic hands. Martin Clapp was the reclusive head of layout and also an animator on Peter and the Wolf, who had impressed me recently with the waterfall of great ideas that streamed out of him in a recent brainstorming discussion with Director Frank Budgen about his film ShockHeaded Peter.

We were a pretty chaotic and motley collection, marshaled strictly by me. I had decided by the time of our first brain-storming sessions:

1. We were going to use tristesse (Opus 10 no.3) as the theme tune for our film.
2. It was going to be a musical and will feature breakdancing to Chopin. I had completely fallen for the artistic talents of choreographer and musical show director, Kate Prince, whose breakdance show, Into the Hoods, I had recently gone to see. And I brought her into our script sessions.
3. I had been totally converted to Chopin by this stage, having listened to his music constantly for 2 months, and had come round to what Geoff had been telling me from the beginning- that if we were to do a film celebrating the music of Chopin- it would have to mainly feature his pieces for solo piano, and to make our lives easier, agreed with Geoff that we should restrict ourselves to the Études, as it fitted with the educational remit of what we were doing.

Martin wanted to make a film about magic or aliens. Marianela wanted to write Marianela-style grim fairy tales. Adam wanted to do the most beautiful animation in the world ever. Geoff wanted everyone to really appreciate the genius of Chopin. Kate I think was only ever marginally interested; I think our link to film interested her, and there was a certain curiosity as to the fact we wanted to do dance in animation.

At that stage I was working on a number of projects, most of which were feature films, and therefore commercially more viable than what was then labeled Project Chopin. We couldn’t do a feature film, because there was no way that we had either the time or the funding opportunities to do a stop-motion feature film.

But I had started something, and I was being pushed hard by my Polish trainee Producer, Magda Bargiel, who sensed that we had the opportunity to do a special project in Poland. Marianela and Robin were furiously outputting scripts to my brief that were getting lukewarm reactions from the directors and from Geoff. Marianela and Robin had been talking a lot with Martin, and they shared a lot in common in their tastes for the fantastical and magical in animation, and were bugging me to widen the brief. Begrudgingly I agreed, and I opened the lid on a whole range of robot, magic aliens, monsters and all sorts! Throughout this process Geoff was feeding us YouTube links and examples, and laying Chopin’s  études over all sorts of material- Polish skater videos, Woody Allen films, breakdancing. There was an emormous amount of research and ideas being generated through the scripting process.

One of the problems was that everything that Mari wrote Martin did these wonderful inspiring magical illustrations for, I wanted to make every one of the films that was in Martin’s drawings. But they were Trojan horses, smuggling other stories onto a vehicle that was for Chopin. I reigned the Trojan horse back in, but some of the magical ideas and fantasy from this explosion of different paths remained.

In this process of scripts and drawings Martin drew, inspired by the Lazienki Park Monument, a Flying Piano. Even the first thumbnails were beautiful, and it was the first piece that everyone got behind. It appealed to Adam’s sense of beauty, it appealed to Martin, Robin and Mari’s sense of fantasy, and Geoff and Marek thought it a beautiful metaphor for the transporting beauty of Chopin’s music. The Flying Machine became our anchor.

Mari and Martin immediately untethered it and we went flying off in all directions. I kept bringing it back to Poland; back to the fact I wanted a dance in there; back to the fact that the music wasn’t the soundtrack but needed to be the emotional core of the film.


- Hugh Welchman

For more information on The Flying Machine visit our page on Facebook

Anna Larsen - Performing the Études

Young musician Anna Larsen performed three of Chopin's Études as the live soundtrack to three of BreakThru's short films: 'Little Postman', 'Night Island' and 'Pl!nk' at the Lincoln Centre, NYC. In our inaugural blog post, she describes her experiences...

When I first heard I was invited to perform Chopin Études as the live soundtrack to children's movies at Lincoln Center, I was overcome by curiosity and excitement. Which Chopin Etudes would I be playing? How many? What were the movies like? Then we heard from the Lang Lang Foundation that the etudes I would be learning were Opus 10 no. 4, the Revolutionary Etude (Op. 10 no. 12) and the Octave Etude (Op. 25 no. 10).  I was surprised and even a little bit scared about the octave etude.  Playing fast legato octaves was going to be a challenge for my small hands. When my piano teachers learned about the concert, they were concerned with the timeline (six and a half weeks to master 3 Chopin etudes and perform them at Lincoln Center!).  Deep down inside, I knew that even though it would be a challenge, the event would be awesome and I was positive I could do it.

                  

Anna performed a live soundtrack to 'Little Postman' (above)

I started with the octave etude, since it would be one of the most challenging to play. At first, I played very slowly. Over the course of the next few weeks, I gradually sped up until I could play at three times that speed. Also, I began working on Op. 10 no. 4, which was also difficult because of the speed!  Since Lang Lang had played the original soundtrack, it was up to us to recreate his magic and daring tempo in front of a live audience.  When we received the DVDs with Lang Lang's soundtrack, his tempo was metronome 168 to the quarter note! I never played anything that fast before!  It was insane!  Would I be able to do it?  I practiced for days, and the etude became faster and faster. Soon, I ran into a problem: the etude wasn't getting faster anymore. Even though I was trying, the piece simply wasn't making that much progress. I turned to my teacher for help, and he told me I was thinking too carefully about every note. “Think about the piece in groups and phrases, not about the articulation of each individual note.”  This helped a lot. I would practice as fast as I could go, except in very little groupings of notes. Gradually, I strung the groups of notes together until I could play a whole phrase at this rapid tempo. Soon I could play the whole piece at Lang Lang speed! Even my teachers couldn't believe how fast I mastered the etudes.  On Thursday the 15^th (my twelfth birthday, and two days before the concert), I rehearsed the three etudes over Skype for Nic Marshall, one of the organizers of the concert. We had to use Skype because there was no time for everyone to drive down to NYC to meet in person before the concert.  Technology is great!  When I finished playing, she had tears in her eyes and said that this concert was going to be even better than she thought it would!

The big day arrived.   It was amazing to finally meet everyone. I was shown to the beautiful theatre. After I tried out the piano, there was a run-through of the concert. I was totally amazed by the effect of the movie on the giant screen with the huge sound effects compared with the tiny DVD player I had practiced with at home. It was as if I were actually part of the scenes in the movie, experiencing everything the characters were. After the run-through was finished, I met Hugh Welchman, the person who had created the movies and Dorota Kobiela, the director.  Hugh showed me and Derek the puppets used to film the movie The Magic Piano. Also, he explained how the filming worked and how they shot the whole movie one frame at a time, with 24 frames per second. That must take a tonne of patience! I thought.

Performers Derek Wang and Anna Larsen with producer Hugh Welchman
onstage at the Lincoln Centre

After rehearsal, we killed some time, and then it was time for the concert! We walked out into the hall, where I saw kids with their families eating popcorn, and that's when I realized that I shouldn't be nervous! Popcorn with movies and classical music!  These were kids who wanted to have a good time. All I needed to do was relax and have fun! The whole theatre buzzed with excitement as the opening music played. I asked Derek, "Is your teacher here?" "Yeah, somewhere in the back," he replied. "Cool! I wonder if he's eating popcorn," I joked. Then, the lights dimmed and there was a short introduction before I went up and played. This is it! This is what all my hard work is for, so pour your heart into it, I thought to myself. I smiled as I watched the familiar little kid on the movie screen appear and clang his colorful xylophone as I began to play Op. 10 no. 4. At first, I was a little nervous. I couldn't exactly help it. But as I continued to play, I felt more and more comfortable. By the time I had reached the octave etude, all my nerves had almost entirely disappeared and all that remained was excitement! When I played the slow section of the octave etude, I felt that this was the best I had ever played this part. I let all my feelings enter the music for the remainder of the concert, and the Revolutionary Etude was full of passion and perfectly timed with the movie, the big explosions in sync with the big chords. After I was finished, there was huge applause and cheering, and I was completely happy. All of my work had paid off! I cheerfully bowed and then put on my 3D glasses to watch Derek perform. I suddenly felt very lucky that I only had to play three etudes... Derek had to play nine! I admired him for his courage to learn so much music, and he did a great job. The question and answer session was mostly questions about how the movies were made.

The concert was over, and the best part was that the kids loved it! We went into the main lobby to meet the kids and parents, who had many wonderful compliments for me and Derek. We talked for a while with Kristina, Lukas, Nic, Hugh, and Dorota, and then it was time to leave. We waved goodbye to Derek and got back into the car. By participating in the New York International Children's Film Festival, Derek and I had just helped put on a great show that lots of kids enjoyed and were inspired by, and I couldn't wait to do something like this again!

- Anna Larsen