When it comes to the BAFTA Award for Best British Short Animation, the National Film and Television School (NFTS) is almost synonymous with success – it’s hard to think of a year when one of their graduation films wasn’t nominated. Over the past decade, filmmakers like Daisy Jacobs, Nina Gantz, and Paloma Baeza have all taken home the award. Hoping to follow in their footsteps in 2025 is recent graduate José Prats, whose film Adiós is a contender this year and stood out to us as one of the highlights of the NFTS’ 2024 graduate showcase. The grounded story of a father struggling to accept his adult son’s decision to move abroad, told through tactile stop motion, Adiós obviously carries personal significance for Prats, a Spanish director who came to the UK to study. In our conversation, he shares the inspiration behind his short, his shift from 2D animation to stop motion and provides a behind the scenes look at how he brought his vision to life. Adiós will be battling it out with fellow nominees Mog’s Christmas and Wander to Wonder for the Best British Short Animation prize when the BAFTA awards are announced on February 16th.

[The following interview is also available to watch at the end of this article.]

You created Adiós while studying at the National Film and Television School here in the UK. Could you share a bit about your filmmaking journey leading up to your time at the NFTS and what inspired you to pursue your studies there?

Back in 2012, I finished my degree in fine arts, which I undertook in Spain and Italy. Before that, I actually set off to become an architect. I started one year in Valencia, Spain, and after a few months I realised that I didn’t want to become an architect. There were so many constrictions, so many laws. I loved the creative part of it and being able to create buildings and even cities or landscapes. I loved drawing outdoors, parks, buildings and all that but soon I realised I didn’t want to pursue it. So without really knowing what to do in the future, I moved to fine arts.

That was a five-year degree and around the third year, I discovered animation. I have a very vivid memory of watching the film Coraline, which is, funnily enough, also stop motion. Before that, I used to watch films just for the fun of it. I never thought about animation techniques or how things were done but watching that film was the first time I ran to watch the credits because I wanted to know how this film had been done and by who. From then on, during the rest of my third year of fine arts and throughout my fourth and fifth years, I decided to use my studies and the courses that I had within my degree to tell stories through animation.

First and foremost, since drawing and painting were my main skills, I used to do little animations which led me into the making a graduation film from my university degree, which wasn’t great. I didn’t show it to anyone other than family and friends. I wasn’t particularly proud, but I learned a lot in the process. I then moved on to work in the animation industry as a concept artist, character designer and storyboard artist. I realized very soon that I didn’t want to be an animator because during that fine arts graduation film I had to animate fully on my own and I didn’t enjoy the processs. I enjoyed the pre-production and the storytelling, but this 2D animation was a bit too hard for me.

In parallel to my work and my career as an illustrator and concept artist for animation, I started developing my own stories. I even took some writing and directing courses, not necessarily for animation as I also love directing actors and live action films. That led me to put together the story and the 2D animated short Umbrellas that represented my showcase to the industry and the world as a director. It was hard for us to put together the budget to make Umbrellas. It was a six-year journey but thankfully, we finished it and it went really well. We screened at famous festivals like Clermont-Ferrand, we were nominated for the Goya Awards, and pretty much right after that, I moved on to study at the NFTS.

The NFTS is known for its animated grad films and has a long history of seeing its films getting BAFTA nominated. However when I think of previous films that have got those nominations, it’s more films with fantasy elements like Poles Apart or Edmond. Whereas Adiós feels like a much more grounded piece, rooted in reality.

So one little comment about making an animated film that is not fantasy or surrealistic I always say, why not? At the end of the day, animation is a medium and in the same way you can paint a painting of a dragon blowing fire or you can paint a few peasants working in a field. You can paint whatever. Same with the rest of the arts. So I think with animation as a branch of filmmaking or cinema art, you are entitled to tell any story in any way you want to.

In my particular case, it was the perfect storm because with Umbrellas I had made a 2D animation short film which has fantasy elements to it. I wanted to do something different that represented the type of director I wanted to become. I wanted to make films more grounded in reality and more personal. Adiós came about when we were developing the ideas to show to our tutors at the NFTS and was inspired by a story that I had written for a live action short film. My writer Natalia Kyriacou and my producer Bernardo Angeletti said they thought the story had a lot of potential and was also immensely personal, which is something that the tutors were eager to push us into – very personal territories, even to the point where you feel uncomfortable speaking about it. Although we thought about having some magical elements, which can be easily done in animation as compared to live action, I decided to keep it very naturalistic.

I wanted to do something different that represented the type of director I wanted to become. I wanted to make films more grounded in reality and more personal.

I’m glad you kept it grounded. It’s one of the things I love about the film and watching it, you can tell that this is a personal film that means something to the director. It’s also a very relatable story. I found myself watching it and reflecting on my own relationships with my parents. Was there a particular takeaway that you wanted a viewer to have from the film?

It’s something that I haven’t really thought much about. Many people have great relationships with their parents. I wouldn’t call mine a very healthy relationship, particularly with my father. But at the end of the day, he’s my father and he’s taught me so much. I lost connection with him when I was a teenager which, for many reasons, lasted right up to today. So if there is something that I would want people to take from this film is to honour their parents and try to connect with them. There might be reasons why not to do it but there are also so many reasons why you can at least try to make an attempt of getting to know them and understand them. Sometimes as kids from a different generation, with different mindsets, we just refuse to connect with them. For men of my father’s generation it’s highly difficult to connect. They haven’t been taught to do that so in a way, its our responsibility as their kids to take the first steps of that reconnection.

I want to talk about how you moved from the traditional 2D animation of Umbrellas to the style of Adiós. It’s a beautiful film that has this sense of place and scale but why did you choose to tell this particular story in stop motion and not a different style?

There are, I’d say, two main reasons. There’s a practical one and there is a more artistic one. The practical one is that at the NFTS, we as directors are also asked to animate our films. The live action fiction directors will work with actors and they can hire for two, three or even four or five days. You cannot hire an animator for six months so we have to animate our films in principle. But as I told you, I’m not a great animator. I don’t even enjoy animating myself. I love working with actors and animators and I knew finding good animators if I were to make a 2D animation film was going to be very, very hard. I experienced that with Umbrellas. We had a budget (not a great one) and we still struggled a lot to find animators. So I thought, OK, maybe I can find great young or inexperienced stop motion animators to come and help me. Because in stop motion to have a nice portfolio piece, you need to build a puppet, you need to build a set, and you need to have great lighting which I was planning but at the same time, they could utiulise their skills in the film and that would be a perfect matchup.

Then the other reason why we chose this technique over 2D or even live action or pixelation or CGI, is because of the materials. This is set in the surroundings of my parents’ holiday house in the South East of Spain and the texture of everything, the walls, the furniture, it’s so old that the minute you get there, it’s got a personality to it. And not just that, the vegetation, the ground, the rocks, the guns, every element of the story. So I was very eager to bring my team, who were not Spanish, to my countryside house so that they could feel the place and not just see the pictures. We had lunch there, we went around, we took pictures. The production designer, Aurora Melpignano drew a lot of sketches from different elements and we tried to use the materials, yarn, paper, and different types of wood, to enhance this world and to make it more tactile.

I was very eager to bring my team, who were not Spanish, to my countryside house so that they could feel the place, not just see the pictures, but feel it.

Watching Adiós there are two obvious characters, but there’s also a third which is the house and the environment which all play a part. I really like the way you created this sense of scale and space, how did you capture that essence of place?

Luckily, Aurora comes from a Mediterranean country. She’s Italian and the architecture and the vegetation in Italy is similar, especially the rural vegetation and landscape, so she already had a really clear idea about it. But at the same time, bringing her to the specific place so that she could see the house and the textures was paramount to me. The house, the living room, the kitchen, it’s a very close interpretation of the real place. Of course, she very cleverly placed the different elements and moved them around so that they could work for the camera and the blocking of the characters. At one point she took a picture of the place that I sent to my family WhatsApp group and they were like, “Why have you moved all the furniture?” Then they realized that in the corner of the image, was a pair of scissors which looked massive in the picture!

I feel like sound plays an important part in making the film feel grounded and real as when they go outside it provides a sense of the environment and the scale of where they are. What was your approach to the sound design with Adiós?

I’m very happy you noticed that because the sound design, even the music, the soundtrack, was kept very minimal. We travelled to Spain a bunch of times because the first time we went there it was March and the sounds, especially outside, were not the same. My sound designer, Liam Sharpe, came with me three times because the first time it was quite rainy and we didn’t want that atmosphere on those sounds. We spent hours inside the house, recording the ambience outside, and getting the cicadas and the steps. In terms of collecting the sounds, it was quite fun and easy. There’s not much going on so there’s no sound contamination or anything.

We wanted the sound also to play a major role towards the end when the father is completely alone.

But then it was his marvellous touch working in the sound studio, refining every element so that it was in accordance with the story. We also wanted the sound to play a major role towards the end when the father is completely alone. At some point I told him I would love to keep the sound to the bare minimum – even to the point that if there are people in the screening room coughing or breathing, you can hear them – to fully convey the loneliness and the emptiness. And he very masterfully did that. The sound approach in general was trying to be faithful to the place and then be a bit expressionistic in some key moments of the story so that we could enhance the visuals, retrieving the sound or the other way around.

Our audience contains a lot of emerging filmmakers so while it’s good to discuss what worked on a film, I also think it’s important to talk about some of the challenges and problems you had.

No one from the team had done stop motion before so I think that was a big handicap. As a 2D animator you control what you want to draw and the timings and all that so unless the computer burns in a fire, you should be fine. But in stop motion, there are so many elements that can affect the smoothness of the production. For example, we didn’t know that the type of lights that we were using, which were tungsten lights, even though they were beautiful, they used to blow in the middle of a shot. I learned that in stop motion, normally you work with LED lights, but they didn’t give us the heat and the power that the director of photography wanted so we had to compromise by having some bulbs blow during the shot. That was a major setback because we had to change the light and then try to adjust the intensity, which wasn’t easy and delayed the animation process a lot.

I learned the hard way is that in stop motion animation, every element of the set should be super stiff, very, very hard and if you blow, it shouldn’t move!

Probably the biggest setback and the biggest lesson that I learned is that even though the landscapes looked beautiful, they were made of fabric and yarn and different materials and they were not stiff. What I learned the hard way is that in stop motion animation, every element of the set should be super stiff, very, very hard and if you blow, it shouldn’t move! It should only move if you want it to – if you brush it or you touch it or whatever. So everything moved and not because we wanted it to just because of the heat of the lights and the material itself. That meant we had to animate the outdoor shots straight away. We started at 9 in the morning and then took shifts to animate during the night, even at 3 am, 4 am, up to the next day. That was really, really hard. It’s not desirable to work that way because we finished very burnt out after having to animate overnight for many, many nights because there were very long shots. If I had to do this again, I would try to speak with my production designer and also my DOP and find a way to make the production sustainable over a long time and not have to worry about elements moving here and there, which was a bit of a headache.

Well, all the hard work obviously paid off. You’ve made a fantastic film and one that is now in the running for a BAFTA. As a filmmaker, what does that recognition mean for you?

As I mentioned earlier, I was nominated fo a Goya award in Spain and that was huge, particularly because these types of awards are known by everybody. Sometimes I make films and they get into festivals but most of my friends and family don’t know much about filmmaking or prizes so they’re like, “Alright, it went to this festival.” But when they hear the BAFTAs or the Goyas, I’m thinking about my grandma in particular, she’s proud and like, “Oh, wow. It looks like you’re doing well because you reached a Goya or you reached a BAFTA nomination!” That makes me particularly happy to have the people around me understand what I do and it has a certain type of recognition. What I like in particular about this BAFTA nomination is that even though it’s made in the UK, most of the team is British, and it’s produced by the National Film Television School in the UK – it’s not very British. It’s 100% a Spanish story. If anything, the only element that connects it to the UK is that the son, Alex, is hoping to travel to the UK to find a job, which is what I did a few years ago. I really appreciate that above the theme or the narrative the filmmaking quality has granted us this recognition from the academy members of BAFTA which is such a huge privilege. I’m very proud of that.

And finally, I wanted to ask what you’re working on next. Is there anything we should keep an eye out for?

I’m developing two short films at the moment. I still want to work in this format, I love making short films. I’m making another stop motion film called Barro, which means ‘Clay’ in English. I’m working with two producers in the UK, in Manchester and they are graduates from the NFTS from a few years before me. We are trying to find collaborators for production in Spain and Portugal. That’s one film we are trying to get made between 2025 – 2026. I’m also developing a live action short film, which essentially mark my debut as a professional live action short film director. I’ve made a bunch in the past, but this would be the main one. And I am also writing and developing a couple of ideas for feature films. I don’t know yet whether they’re going to be animation or live action, we’ll see how they develop.

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