Private Project

Q

During the Covid-19 emergency in Italy, two neighbors face the quarantine period, each with their difficulties. Their forced 24/7 proximity exposes them to one another's fears and outbursts. The two can't stand each other anymore. They become mischievous. When they reach the peak of exasperation, a horrible event changes things and leads them to look at each other with different eyes.

Durante l'emergenza dovuta al Covid-19 in Italia, due vicini di casa affrontano il periodo di quarantena ognuno con le proprie difficoltà. La loro vicinanza forzata, 24 ore su 24, li espone alle paure e agli sfoghi reciproci. I due non si sopportano più. Diventano dispettosi. Quando raggiungono l'apice dell'esasperazione, un brutto avvenimento cambia le cose e li porta a guardarsi a vicenda con occhi diversi.

  • Francesca Floris
    Producer
  • Francesca Floris
    Director
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Director
  • Francesca Floris
    Writer
  • Davide Petrosino
    Writer
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Writer
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Editor
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Concept artist
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Animator
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    3D artist
  • Fabrizio Di Palma
    Storyboard artist
  • Beatrice Mele
    Sound designer
  • Elena Alvandi
    Composer
  • Project Title (Original Language):
    Q
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Short
  • Genres:
    Drama, Surreal
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 48 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    January 14, 2022
  • Production Budget:
    10,160 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Italy
  • Country of Filming:
    Italy
  • Language:
    Italian
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Francesca Floris, Fabrizio Di Palma

Francesca Floris (Oristano, 1992) is a photographer and the co-founder of the Flora's Room animation studio.

In 2010, Francesca was part of the Venice International Film Festival Youth Jury during the 67th edition of the event. The jury is composed of 20/24 people selected from over 6000 students. During high school, Francesca received writing and drawing education from Italian comic book writer Stefano Enna (The Walt Disney Company, Mattel Co., Play Press, Soleil). She moved to London in 2011 to attend Brunel University, where she met and started working with Kristijonas Dirse, with whom she made her first documentary film, "Islands" (2014). In 2012, in London, she started the "Flora's Room" project as a YouTube show for children.

In September 2014, Floris moved to the US to study Media Management at The New School in New York. She received the Dean's Merit Scholarship. In April 2015, she was accepted with a merit-based scholarship as an MFA candidate at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in LA, enrolled for three months, and stopped for personal reasons. In December 2018, she graduated from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome while working on the sets of critical Italian productions. Two of the shorts she produced during her studies at CSC competed for the Venice International Film Critics' Week, two for Camerimage and one for Cortinametraggio.

From 2017 to 2020, Francesca studied and graduated in Visual Anthropology (master's degree) at the University of Siena while working in the field of 3D animation and VFX (in productions such as Paramount Pictures' "Mission: Impossible 7", Rainbow's "44 Cats" and HBO's series "My Brilliant Friend 2" and "The New Pope"). Always attracted by technical experimentation and the mix of reality and fantasy, Francesca trained as an experimental photographer at the CSC in Rome over the years. She gave life to projects such as "Olympus 50", "The White Stage," and "The World of Las," promoted by magazines such as "l'Espresso" and exhibited in Brera and other noteworthy Italian cultural centers.

Francesca's master's degree thesis at the University of Siena, based on the experiment "The World of Las," starts from a reflection on "Camera Lucida" by Roland Barthes and "Fotografia e Inconscio Tecnologico" by Franco Vaccari. An essay about the experiment, including the full story of "The World of Las" (2019), was published by Officina Libraria and presented at the Santa Teresa Media Library (Brera Academy) in Milan in February 2019. "We Are Not Alone" (Francesca's first animation project) is a short adaptation of a chapter of "The World of Las." In March 2021, Francesca started collaborating with 10D Film as executive producer for "The Athlete," directed by Nicola Sammarco.

In June 2021, Francesca Floris and Fabrizio Di Palma signed to establish Flora's Room as a limited liability company. In September 2021, Francesca joined the team of Scanline VFX/Netflix. In May 2022, Floris joined as a VFX producer the experimentation of the Near-Real-Time pipeline on the movie "Comandante" (SIGGRAPH 2022).

Floris is an active volunteer for the Italian NGO EMERGENCY and the LGBTQIA+ community in Italy.

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Fabrizio Di Palma (Sassari, 1997) is an animator, 3D modeler, character designer, and Flora's Room Animation Studio co-founder. After high school, he moved to Turin, where he attended the Albertina Academy of Fine Arts.
In September 2020, he debuted his first animated short film, "9871 km," at the animation festival "La città incantata," with excellent results. He subsequently began collaborating with "Flora's Room," contributing to the short "We Are Not Alone" and to the writing and making of the animated short film "Q." During his studies, he carried out research aimed at analyzing a possible new visual language that makes use of the sign, of graphic and pictorial techniques applied to digital animation.

A little conversation with Fabrizio...

In designing the animated short film "Q," we wanted to combine the versatility and flexibility of 3D animation with the expressiveness and visual impact of 2D animation. Over the years, 3D animation has undergone a natural process of style homologation due to the technical limitations of this technology, which studios have tried to cope with through an increasingly careful search for super-realism. However, 3D animation also gives access to the ability to move the camera in real-time in space and easily change the angle of the frame and the focal length of the virtual lens. It also lets you play with the lights in real time and quickly change lighting. It, therefore, unlocks a much more cinematic approach with new potential.
However, the 2D animation approach leaves much more room for creativity, design, and style, thus making it possible to adopt new, distinct, and characteristic aesthetics. In "Q," we combined the two worlds to exploit the maximum potential. We have created a work pipeline and implemented some techniques to obtain the flexibility of 3D and the expressiveness of 2D and combine them in a new visual language. We started with the character design. We designed the characters looking for a level of synthesis typical of 2D but keeping the limits of digital modeling in mind. We also identified the traits and aspects that we would have kept in the finished product, such as the type of coloring, the outline, the sign, and the distinct lines of the illustration.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

In March 2020, when the government of Italy imposed a national quarantine in response to the growing pandemic of COVID-19 in the country, none of us were prepared for what was about to happen. Events followed one another at an unsustainable speed. Everyone tried their best to react to what was going on. Everyone tried to give themselves answers that no one seemed to have. The aim was to maintain sanity. If we lose sanity, we also lose the ability to protect the people around us. This short film is our way of looking for answers, and it all started with a survey.

"I started it on March 21, 2020. The survey consisted of 12 questions of different types, some of a general nature and others more specific, all relating to the quarantine experience. I asked people to open up about how the situation in the country made them feel, and I was surprised by the answers. Some people have taken it as a chance to blow off steam. At first, I could recognize the answers of my friends and relatives... after only a few hours, I started seeing answers from places in Italy where I didn't know anyone. I collected the responses of 398 people from all over the country." (Francesca)

Some people have written about being concerned about those around them. Someone wrote of having attempted suicide earlier in life and being afraid that this situation would lead them to the point of doing it again. Other people spoke about wanting to go home, end a relationship, leave their jobs, and change their lives. A friend of ours did it when the country's situation improved. She left everything and joined the man she loved on the other side of the country. They recently got married.

One answer in particular, on March 22, was heartbreaking. The question was: "If you could choose a moment during this quarantine that you consider most significant in representing your state of mind, what would you choose? What emotion did you feel? Did something in particular cause it?". This person answered: "My mom is a doctor, and she ensured I knew how to access her life insurance premium. I cried for two hours".

"When I read that answer, it hit me all at once: we had to be ready to let go of a generation of people we loved, and most of us could do nothing about it except stay home and away from trouble. When the first lockdown ended, while helping my parents in the summer family business here in Sardinia, I kept talking to guests from all over Italy. A man who lived in Lombardy told me how his father was diagnosed and hospitalized, and he could no longer see him. The father then died. Unfortunately, there are thousands of stories like this one." (Francesca)

Through this short film, we tried to tell the facts and share our emotions and feelings, bringing together our stories and all the stories that Italians have told during those difficult months.

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Nel marzo 2020, quando il governo italiano ha imposto una quarantena nazionale in risposta alla crescente pandemia di COVID-19 nel paese, nessuno di noi era preparato a ciò che stava accadendo. Gli eventi si sono verificati a una velocità insostenibile. Ognuno ha cercato a modo suo di reagire a quello che stava succedendo. Tutti hanno cercato di darsi risposte che nessuno sembrava avere. L'obiettivo era mantenere la sanità mentale. Se perdevamo la sanità mentale, perdevamo anche la capacità di proteggere le persone intorno a noi. Questo cortometraggio è stato un modo per cercare delle risposte, ed è cominciato con un sondaggio.

"L'ho iniziato il 21 marzo 2020. Il sondaggio consisteva in 12 domande di diverso tipo, alcune di natura generale e altre più specifiche, tutte relative all'esperienza della quarantena. Ho chiesto alle persone di aprirsi su come le faceva sentire la situazione che si stava verificando nel paese e sono rimasta sorpresa dalle risposte. Penso che alcune persone l'abbiano presa come un'opportunità per sfogarsi. All'inizio riuscivo a riconoscere le risposte dei miei amici, parenti ... dopo solo poche ore ho iniziato a vedere risposte da posti in Italia dove non conoscevo nessuno. Sono riuscita a raccogliere le risposte di 398 persone da tutto il Paese." (Francesca)

Alcune persone hanno scritto di preoccuparsi per coloro che li circondano. Qualcuno ha scritto di aver tentato il suicidio in precedenza nella vita e di aver paura che questa situazione li avrebbe portati al punto di farlo di nuovo. Altre persone hanno parlato di voler tornare a casa, voler chiudere una relazione, voler lasciare il proprio lavoro e cambiare vita. Una nostra amica l'ha fatto quando la situazione del paese è migliorata. Ha lasciato tutto e si è unita all'uomo che ama, dall'altra parte del paese. Si sposeranno presto.

Una risposta in particolare, il 22 marzo, spezza il cuore. La domanda era: "Se potessi scegliere un momento durante questa quarantena che consideri più significativo nel rappresentare il tuo stato d'animo, quale sceglieresti? Che emozione hai provato? È stata causata da qualcosa in particolare?". La risposta che questa persona ha dato è stata: "Mia madre è un medico e si è assicurata che io sapessi come si accede al premio per la sua assicurazione sulla vita. Ho pianto per due ore".

"Quando l'ho letta, mi sono resa conto tutto in una volta: dovevamo essere pronti a lasciar andare una generazione, persone che amavamo, e la maggior parte di noi non poteva farci niente, tranne restare a casa e lontano dai guai. Quando si è concluso il primo lockdown, mentre aiutavo i miei genitori nell'attività estiva di famiglia qui in Sardegna, ho continuato a parlare con ospiti che venivano da tutta Italia. Un uomo che ha vissuto in Lombardia mi ha raccontato come suo padre è stato diagnosticato, ricoverato in ospedale e lui non ha potuto più vederlo. Il padre poi è morto. Sfortunatamente, ci sono migliaia di storie come questa." (Francesca)

Attraverso questo cortometraggio abbiamo cercato di raccontare i fatti e condividere emozioni e sentimenti, cercando di mettere insieme le nostra e tutte le storie che gli italiani hanno raccontato in quei difficili mesi.