Absolute Love Cabeza Voladora Garners Bronze at Tokyo Film Awards
A music video titled Absolute Love Cabeza Voladora, created by an Alicante animation studio, earned a Bronze Award for Best Music Video at the Tokyo Film Awards, a notable Japanese short film festival recognition. This accolade marks the first award for the project, which began during the pandemic and was developed in collaboration with students and graduates from an Audiovisual Communications degree program. The project credits the collaboration of UMH and the direction of Italian filmmaker Carlo Avventi.
The music video was conceived as a four-minute piece and expanded to eight minutes and forty seconds to accommodate a moving sequence enhanced through a live-image segment. The live-action element centers on performer Arly Jones, a key figure in Cabeza Voladora, alongside co-founders Sami Natsheh and Arly Jones, who shapes the narrative through movement and expression.
Absolute Love is part of a feature-length project bearing the same title, distributed by Avventi. The story follows a musician who achieved fame with a hit in the 1980s and, two decades later, lives a quiet, retired life along the Costa Blanca. The animated video clip serves as a cinematic snapshot of that era, a one-shot sequence that propelled the star to renewed recognition.
In the production phase, the team collaborated with dancers Carmela Garcia and Alex Espinoza, who perform on-screen dance sequences for the video. Both performers come from the Elche-based dance company OtraDanza and contributed their movements to inspire the animation process. The animation relied on rotoscopy, a technique where live-action movement informs the drawn frames, creating a seamless blend between real performance and stylized illustration.
The visual script and storyboarding for the short were devised by Arly Jones and earned a nomination for Best Storyboarding at the Manchester Animation Festival. This nomination marked Cabeza Voladora as the sole Spanish representative at that international competition, underscoring its cross-border collaborative achievement and artistic ambition.