García and Edelman are in their eighth and final semester of the Bachelor’s Degree in Animation and Video Games at Universidad ORT Uruguay. However, Goober was created earlier.
It was in early 2019, as part of a project for the courses Production 2 (fifth semester) and Production 3 (sixth semester). The two students decided to collaborate on a short film that would incorporate all the skills they had acquired during their studies, with the goal of surpassing the quality of the short films they had previously created individually in the Production 1 course.
According to García, the program progressively covers all the components of animation up through Production 1, which is when students create their first short film. Then, in Production 2 and 3, the projects become larger in scale.“We cover subjects like screenwriting, storyboarding, animation, and sound, among other things. This doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll end up handling every aspect of a short film or animation, but it does give us the ability to understand how they work,” said Edelman.
Goober won the award for Best Animated Short Film at Fenacies and Best Uruguayan Student Short Film at FIA.
According to the students, although it wasn’t the first short film they made, it was the first time they tackled so many different aspects in a more professional manner. “In the Production 1 short film, we used copyright-free music, ambient sounds from places like a library, and things like that. For this one, we set out to do something different: we had someone with expertise handle the sound and cast voice actors; it was the first time we held voice auditions. It was our first experience stepping outside the university setting, so to speak,” explained Edelman.
A short film inspired by a Hanna-Barbera classic
Goober emerged as a take on Scooby-Doo. Drawing on the creators’ favorite genres, the animation blended mystery, suspense, and the absurd, culminating in a dog as the story’s protagonist.
“A key element we discussed among ourselves was that if the short film were an episode of a series, like Scooby-Doo, it would be the final one. That allowed us to play with a kind of subtext from a previous story—what had already happened. It’s something you don’t actually see, but you can infer it,” said García. According to the creators, based on that idea, they decided to play with the audience’s expectations by having the classic mystery-solving story spiral out of control.
Double award winners
Submissions for Fenacies were accepted in January 2020. More than 2,800 people participated in all the activities; 161 short films—including animated, documentary, music video, and fiction films—from 22 different countries were screened.
At this event, García and Edelman won the award for Best Animated Short Film.
According to them, they never thought they would win, but they always intended to enter the competition. “When we entered last year with our individual short films—which didn’t win, nor did we deserve to—we were already working on this short film and decided to focus on it for this year. Even so, we didn’t know we were going to win, but we always felt we had a chance,” they said.
In the case of the FIA —an event organized by ORT’s School of Communication and Design—they won in the Best Uruguayan Student Short Film category. In addition to domestic entries, the festival featured short films from countries in South America, Asia, and, mostly, Europe. For García and Edelman, the caliber of the FIA was excellent.