This one was a very interesting project to work on at Tessellate. Since its an unreleased film, I'll share whatever details I can. The client, who is a follower of Buddhism was filming a documentary on her Sunim (Korean for Buddhist monk) and for the flashback portions about his journey towards Buddhism, required some visual storytelling.
The great part was that I was free to explore whatever avenue seemed to fit the tone and storytelling. Apart from the fact that I'd get to represent the story of a real life guru, the backdrop was just incredible just as the story was unbelievable. After loads of explorations and trial and error, I'm sharing here what was the final treatment.
Some images from the research material during the Korean War
Visual mood board for the art/animation treatment.
After a few trials and discussions with the client, it was decided that we'd go for a water color painted approach, derivative of Korean classical landscape paintings. All frames were hand painted by me, with minimal modifications on Photoshop. It was tedious, but a lot of fun.
Storyboards for the different segments. Post the shot breakdown from the recordings, they were broken down further via visual scripting. The visuals storytelling had to fit the length of the audio, and the time segment allotted to each frame was very limited, hence limiting the time needed for animations to register. So it was decided that some shots would be almost static with minimal camera motion only, whereas some of them would have frame by frame movements.
Color treatment explorations. Since they were flashback scenes, set in the past, the idea was to go with monotones which was also evocative of the photos documented from the time period. The challenge was to pick a palette which would identify with the geography and convey the stories effectively as well.
Playing around with how much of negative VS positive space to utilize.
In the first image(L), the explosion is darker and with ore smoky strokes, whereas the second one(R) utilizes the negative space against a more painted sky.
For the animated sections, we decided to go with a motion comic approach with limited movement to be created via After Effects. For that every moving element had to be created separately. Tis required meticulous planning of each shot and rigorous post production.
How the above elements would come together to look like in the final shot.
Where transitions would not work well, the key frames were manually painted and blended during editing.
Sharing some of the final image edits below.
Hope you had a great time going through the project. I will share the final clips once ready for release.
Thanks a lot!
:)
