Lucie Sunková’s animated short The Tree was finished in France. Colour grading, final film mix and mastering took place in the Sylicone post-production studios in Paris. The studios have already served for recording the soundtrack to the otherwise wordless film. The soundtrack was composed by the French composer Olivier Daviaud and recorded with French musicians.
The production of the film took more than 12 months with the major part of the production consumed by animating the film itself in Prague studios Anima. Lucie Sunková used the method of paint-on-glass animation and spent over 9 months working on the film.
The budget of the co-production reached almost 150 thousand EUR and it was evenly split between MAUR film and Les Films de’l Arlequin with the support of national film funds from both sides – Czech Republic was represented by the State Cinematography Fund and France by the prestigious national fund CNC – Centre National du Cinema.
The film is an excellent example of an animated film fulfilling the role of an experimental laboratory of animation. Such films are being made after a long period of time as it was almost impossible to get funding for such projects in the Czech Republic.
The film is to be accompanied by a travelling exhibition of original oil paintings from the film (the main problem being the production of atypical light frames backlighting the pictures in a way resembling their creation in animation studios.)
The Tree is a poetic slow film, a metaphorical story about the encounter of two worlds – of trees and of people whose parallel fates resemble and intertwine. What may seem hopeless and definitive at one point, can turn into a happy ending and a promise of a future. The whole film is made using a demanding and unusual technique of paint-on-glass animation when each individual phase of the picture is painted in oil paints applied on glass which then melts into the next phase and thus the film resembles moving oil paintings.
