"In my childhood, I used to tie a magnet to the back of my pants because I had nothing to do, and pull it out of the house all day. I was very happy that the magnet sucked nails, screws and beer caps on the road. I had a very good friend at the time, and he was just as idle as I was. Later, with his unexpected death, my childhood ended there. The short film, titled "Me and the Magnet and a Dead Friend", is from Liu Maoning, a 2018 undergraduate graduate of the School of Animation and Digital Arts of the Communication University of China, and has just been shortlisted for the student unit of the 2019 Annecy International Animation Festival in France.
The full composition and thick colors seem to suck the audience into the time and space of the film, and some netizens described it this way after watching it: "This is simply a childhood autobiography that cuts open the whole soul for the audience to see", which is really touching.
In fact, at the time of graduation, because of the length of the short film, Liu Maoning made a 6-minute condensed version, but after graduation, this story still made him remember, and it took a lot of time to have the current 13-minute version.
The creation of the story is very smooth, Liu Maoning said that he almost smoothed out the entire logic and framework of the story at one time, and it took only one night to set the general direction and complete most of the images and elements in it.
What took a lot of trouble was the stylistic expression of the short film.
In the first stage, Liu Maoning mainly made some visual references, and the European and American animation Torill Kove", "My Morton Bike and Me", gave him a lot of inspiration in terms of art style and narrative method. But the problem with this is that on the screen, the feeling of being away from home is still a lot worse, and the sense of reality is not enough.
In the second stage, Liu Maoning tried the feeling of oil painting or gouache, which enhanced the saturation of color, and the picture was no longer rigid, but the sense of art was "too strong".
It was not until the third stage that Liu Maoning combined the first two stages to form a new style, which is the final style of "Me and the Iron Absorbing Stone and a Dead Friend" that we have seen.
"After things are buried, they grow on their own, and this film is the result of growth." Liu Maoning said, "My creation, I hope that people who have seen it have a sense of pleasure in breathing a long sigh of relief - this is the principle of my creation." At present, Liu Maoning is working as a freelancer, creating picture books and illustrations. He also wants to continue to do animation and even try to make feature films if he has the opportunity.