Popular festival short film created by third-year students in New Zealand is now on Vimeo.
Auckland, New Zealand-based Media Design School announced the release of its most recent short film, The Dragon’s Scale on Vimeo.
The Dragon’s Scale tells the tale of a warrior and his son who are on a quest to fix the son’s stammer when the forest conspires the stop the father. The boy decides to go on alone to face the unknown creatures that await.
The project was produced by award-winning director James Cunningham, who is a senior lecturer at the school. The visual effects and animation postproduction work took a group 26, third-year Bachelor of Art and Design (3D Animation and VFX) students four months of intensive work to complete.
“In making The Dragon’s Scale, I was keen to try and put some of New Zealand’s beautiful landscape on the screen,” says Cunningham. “The highlight of producing The Dragon’s Scale was getting permission from the local Iwi to film on Tarawera. The landscape is so dramatic and still bears the scars of the tragic eruption from 130 years ago.”
The film has already achieved some international success, picking up the best fantastic short film, best cinematography and the overall prize for best short film at the Torremolinos Fantastic Film Festival 2016, and has screened at festivals all around the world, including Japan and Columbia and Spain, but Cunningham says that the most rewarding aspect of The Dragon’s Scale is the positive reception it has received at home in New Zealand.
“The film had its world premiere at the New Zealand International Film Festival last year, where it was played before the feature-length film Captain Fantastic,” he says. “That pairing was the most-seen screening of the entire festival across the country.”
Source: Media Design School
