If you thought animation does not exist in Mozambique, think again. FX Lda Animation Studios (FX) was founded in September of 2004, by Nildo Essá. FX is a young Mozambican company, formed by Architects, Animators and Graphic Artists, specializing mostly in the commercials, TV series and Feature Film Productions. Offering personalized solutions and the highest quality at the most affordable rates, FX makes use of their diverse in-house skills including animation, technical and conceptual drawings inspired by several fields including architecture, graphic design and film to reach a unique and innovative result.
Due to the innovations and technologies implemented by the company, FX is able to offer international quality at Highly Competitive Prices. Most FX customers know exactly what they want from their business, but don’t necessarily know how to take advantage of the benefits of what digital technology can offer, and that’s where FX Lda come in with creative innovative high tech solutions.
The team’s combined knowledge in animation, art, design as well as all technical details affords the studio the upper advantage to be able to give its clients a creative and innovative edge. This has made the studio able to compete amongst the best in Africa, resulting in award winning FX Lda Studios becoming the biggest animation studio in Mozambique synonymous for excellent television, film, architecture and commercials.
Brats or “Os Pestinhas” (Pestinhas means Naughty/Clever)
“Late in 2010, my team and I started with the idea of creating our own Characters with the intent to produce educational material but without the element of “boredom” if you will, that normally comes with institutional videos about AIDS for example. We thought we could convey these messages in a more interesting and appealing way through Cartoons.
It was a very successful idea as regular kids identified themselves with the Brats or “Os Pestinhas” as they are originally called.
We produced our first short movie in 2011, Called “O tio Xixiteiro”, it’s hard to translate in English, but it was basically about a bad Habit that the local people have to urinate on trees in Public. It was a success, people and especially kids loved it.
We kept improving and doing this IN-HOUSE Project whenever we could, but it was always very hard, because the project was always (and still is) self-funded, whenever we would do a paid project, I would set aside between 60% to 70% of the budget to invest in either Hardware, Software, time to learn etc.
In mid-2013, we finished our very first “long” short of about 12 Minutes, called the “The Brats and the toy thief”, again with Zero budget, and we did it so we could improve on our movie making.” Says Nildo Essá about Pestinhas.
In 2014 after doing some runs on quite a few international festivals, the short film was nominated for best African animation by the AMAA Awards (Africa Movie Academy Awards) in Nigeria, alongside with 4 other animation movies from other countries, including Khumba from SA.
Nildo, recently attended Discop, armed with a script and new movie trailer, in search of the perfect partner to help complete their dream. The team is looking for a South African co-production partner on a R10 million film, R4 million of which will be invested by FX Lda Mozambique. The project has been in development for a while and all sets, main and secondary characters are rigged, textured and prepared for final animation. It is anticipated that it will take 18 months to complete, making use of their motion capture studio of 13 infra-red cameras, whenever there’s a need to speed up the animation process.
For crowd animation, FX is armed with specific software to automate crowd scenes, finding the software to be very effective and efficient. The film is still a work in progress. As of October 2017, the movie trailer, script, main characters and most of the sets were completed. Due to budget constraints the storyboards were changed into a comic book version of the script of about 180 pages, which will be used to make the animatic in order to get a better feel of the whole movie before starting the animation process. FX Lda is looking for part financing and a co-production deal. The plan is to have the film done in English and Portuguese and eventually French.
For updated information follow the production blog
Please see teaser below.
The Brats Movie – Os Pestinhas O Filme Teaser_Trailer from Nildo Essa on Vimeo.
Pass: BratsTeaser-2017
A full trailer is available on request.
PS: FXLDA will be present Annecy 2018.