The mysterious Amulet

Client: Salzburger Nationalparkfonds

short film/visitor film

The adventurous Marie – an 11-year-old girl – is traveling with her parents in the Hohe Tauern National Park. As she discovers a cave, a real adventure begins – she finds a mysterious amulet, meets talking animals, learns about the wonderful nature and how the landscape has changed over the centuries. With her new friends Max and Grete – local animals – Marie sets out to find her parents again and uncover her real treasure.

Length: 10 Min. 20 Sec.
Format: 4K
Year: 2023

Briefing

The customer’s task was to create an animated film that shows the beautiful nature of the national park in an entertaining way and also provide some selected information. The film can be seen as part of the new exhibition “Facettenreich” in the Hohe Tauern National Park.
The content of the exhibition is intended to convey the following to visitors: Nature sets limits for people – people in turn try to shift these limits in their favor by changing nature.
Contentwise, the movie should focus on a) the role of farm animals in changing the environment, which, conversely, also changed the animals that adapted to the prevailing conditions with special characteristics; b) mining, which shaped the Raurisertal for centuries and, in addition to great wealth, also brought a lot of natural destruction; and c) tourism, which benefits from beautiful landscapes with nature that is as intact as possible, but which can also endanger this through overuse.

Implementation

A particular challenge in this project was to create a nature film as an animation. On the one hand, the animated film offers special possibilities, but on the other hand, it was necessary to find a style that captures the beauty of nature, the emotionality of the story and the credibility of the characters in an appealing way and at the same time does justice to the real environment as best as possible.
We decided on a mix of three-dimensional environments that would give a “hand-painted” impression with painted textures and traditional, hand-drawn frame-by-frame character animations, which we thought would best represent the organic and natural topic of the film’s content.
Musically, the film was wonderfully accompanied by specially composed and orchestrated music and brought to life with accurate sound design and professional voice talents from film and TV.

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