The second edition of the Latin American and Caribbean Animation Forum takes place as part of the 45th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema, Havana, Cuba. With the success of its first year, the forum grew and its creators decided to make a vignette with Daniel Rabanéa at the helm.

We caught up with Rabanéa and asked him a little about the making of the piece, which serves an almost flyer-like purpose: “Since this was the first animation specifically for the forum,” he told us, “it was decided to use the forum’s logo character, which is also the character from the most famous Cuban animated feature film, ‘Vampiros en Havana’ by Juan Padrón (1985).

“The animation technique was easy to decide on since everyone involved in this production is a big stop motion enthusiast and producer. We had the character and the technique, but we still didn’t have a story. We thought of many scripts, such as drinking blood with a straw as if it were a drink on the beach, stabbing the cigar with the vampire’s tooth, a drop of blood traveling across the American continent, but in the end, necessity—the mother of creativity, reminded us that it couldn’t be a super production and the deadline was approaching.”

So, timeline in mind, Rabanéa began to focus in on the character itself. “It starts with a vampire sleeping, apparently right-side up. To make this game of positions clear, I thought of a bat flying ‘upside down’ and landing on the vampire’s shoulder. In addition, the vampire smokes a Cuban cigar and the smoke strangely goes down. Then he wakes up, looks at the camera, realizes that the camera is wrong, looks angry and the cameraman corrects the position by turning the camera 180 degrees to the right way, which is to show them actually upside down.”

In addition to the vampire’s positioning joke, the idea of rotating or inverting also met the forum’s theme of, “fostering regional animation, decolonizing production, questioning pre-established standards, thinking, changing directions, so that we can find our own way of creating.”

The characters were made with modeling clay, with the exception of the vampire’s eyes, which are plastic. “I ended up becoming a fan of the artist who designed the character,” Rabanéa said, “because every time I changed the proportions, it was clear that the original drawing was better. The bat and smoke movements were first traced on a tablet and loaded as a reference video in Dragonframe.

“For the cigar smoke, it was possible to repeat the cycle, but all the bat positions were modeled individually and animated by substitution. Although it was a simple work, I really liked the final result: the inverting game, the nostalgic Cuban music, the way it was done naturally by hand, and it being the vignette of an animation forum with an emphasis on original creation.”