Clouds Fly West is a 20-minute documentary which I wrote, directed and produced (yes, actually raising some capital) in my last two years of high-school. The film features motions graphics, 3D and hand-drawn animation combined with original video. The plot follows the effects of migration of Eastern Europeans to Western countries like Germany after the fall of the Iron Curtain. I started working on the movie when I was 16 and completed it a few months before turning 18.
The film appeared in the official programming of two dozes film festivals (US, Canada, France, UK, Sweden and Poland), such as Newport Beach Film Festival and Palm Springs International ShortFest in California. The film won the audience award at NFFTY in Seattle, which is the largest film festival for youth in the world. After the award ceremony, my home country’s national media (Bulgaria) went nuts. The film made headlines in national newspapers and I was interviewed in prime time on the evening news of the main TV channels for a week in the summer of 2011.
The film is made of 37,000+ separate pieces of graphics – video, text, tables, vectors, textures, objects, fonts, models, drawings, sketches and ambient sounds. The raw data size exceeds 1.6 terabytes – which was a lot at the time. The final scene, the “mighty thunderstorm”, which is 15 seconds, took me 10 days to model, working 12+ hours a day. The rendering of the scene was a massively computationally expensive task. I convinced the principal of my high school to let me connect multiple commodity desktop computers in a rendering farm to parallelize the workload and reduce the export time.