Film conception

The content and visual aspect of the film are based on the strongly emotional atmosphere of the novel. The story is set in the early years of the twentieth century. The main character is a little boy of four to five. We watch most of the story through his eyes and that represents the style of the whole film. In content and form, the film reflects a child's soul that does not perceive the order of things and the continuity of time, mixing up reality, memories and emotions. At the beginning the lovely, glowing impressions and situations of past and present intermingle into a single breathtaking and dazzling experience. The charming pictures of the boy's life gradually take shape and change into cold fact and surprisingly bitter knowledge.

The end of the film is an expressively stylized, delightful scene with blissful memories emerging, with wishes and longings materialized through phantasy. All continuity, aspects of time and probability gradually disappear. Phantasies become reality. The strongly expressive visual artistic effects in the film are based on the turn-of the-century style. The delicate symbolics of art nouveau images bring us to a romantically presented veracity of "reality", and on to the aggressive expressionism of the film finale - this concerning the colour conception as well as the story construction of the film. Artistic stylization changes the fateful tragedy into a strongly emotional story. The delicate, glittering tale gradually turns into a psychological horror story, where love and longings do finally win, but only in the soul of the child and in the strong but unrealistic wish of the spectator...

Trick sequences

As the film story hovers on the borderline of reality even during the phantasy images, dreams and stylized scenes, the use of film tricks was indispensable for the visual effect. The film tricks co-create the story as well as the specific atmosphere of the story. Technically speaking, a wide spectrum of trick techniques was used, from simple scenic tricks like the cracking of the egg-shell when the chicken is hatching, through the classical film tricks made in the duplicate film technique (for example multiple exposure in the scene of the tree glowing in the landscape, or the overlapping of flames into the shots of the burning farm...) right down to digital effects realized in full film differentiation at the highly effective post-production workplace Discreet Logic-INFERNO, for example "sticking" flames onto the running chicken or the highly demanding composition of the "Ascention" with which the film culminates.

The actual realization of the film trick sequences went through a technological chain, the beginning of which was formed by an Oxberry film scanner. This scanner transforms pictorial information from the 35 mm negative into digital data. This data is processed in powerful Silicon Graphics computers and Intergraph and the actual realization of the digital effects in the Inferno system of Discreet Logic will took place in real time, with the help of super-computers Sillicon Graphics ONYX II. The data recording in corresponding differentiation and film quality back to the 35 mm negative was done through a Management Graphics film notebook.