Seventeen seconds of cut paper and archive photographs, to open a bicentenary.

The intro film for the Jókai 200 programme: a collage animation of archive photographs, manuscripts, books and the writer’s portrait on torn coral and blue paper, opening on a theatre curtain. One seventeen-second cut and three eight-second cuts in landscape, and a seventeen-second portrait cut for the feed.

The challenge

The gala and every film in the programme needed an opening that said who Jókai was without a word of narration, to an audience that ranged from the hall of the Erkel Theatre to people scrolling past it on a phone. It had to feel like the nineteenth century and move like now.

The approach

We built the film as a paper collage. Archive photographs of Jókai at different ages, his manuscripts and first editions, a camera, a writing desk, pressed flowers and classical columns are cut out and layered on torn sheets of the identity’s coral and blue. A hand lifts the books into frame, a theatre curtain opens, and the sequence lands on the Jókai 200 mark and the portrait.

The long cut runs seventeen seconds for the stage and television. Three eight-second cuts take one beat each for social and pre-roll, and a portrait version re-composes the collage for a phone screen rather than cropping it.

Films

The long cut, seventeen seconds
The portrait cut
Eight seconds, cut one
Eight seconds, cut two
Eight seconds, cut three

The results

The film was made to open the gala at the Erkel Theatre and to lead the programme’s video content in both formats. View counts belong to the broadcasters and platforms that ran it and are not published here.