In a world blurring reality and imagination, Syd, a little 8-year-old boy faces his mother’s impending demise. Desperate to hide from the grasp of Death, they embark on an imagined hide-and-seek game, morphing into Earth’s creatures. Death plays along as their relentless predator.
Hope wanes as their fantastical forms weaken with each pursuit. Syd grapples with Winnie’s frailty. They cycle through the lives of birds, beasts, creatures - but Death persists. At last, Death becomes the ultimate predator: Time. In an embrace with Time, they find peace. Love defies Death, etching an eternal memory.
Please join me in a heartfelt journey of imagination, “The Boy who Cheated Death”, written for Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky”. Through this film, I hope to transform the essence of the song into a visual symphony of hope, love and mysteries of existence.
The band’s musical and cinematic legacy, particularly “The Wall” feature film, ignited a passion in a 13-year-old me that had led me to the long path of filmmaking. I made my first animated short film, “Foreign”, with a cover of Thin Ice by myself, at the heart of Cambridge School of Arts where both Syd Barett and David Gilmour have attended. Now, a decade later, creating a music video for “The Great Gig in the Sky” holds a profound symbolism for me.
Our experiments through diverse animation techniques - 2D, stop motion (in real life and in VR) - is a reflection of Syd’s innocent exploration of mortality. His imaginations manifest in the form of tactile materials - paper, wax, clay, water, glitter, wool… to name a few. Each visual element contributes to unravelling the very complex concept of life and death as Syd tries to understand his mother’s journey. His fear, his hope, his memories and above all - his love - take shape, becoming alive and vibrant.
This approach has brought experimentation and freshness into the project. We aimed to craft a seamless tapestry for our characters to exist, inventing new visuals as we go.
Around the stop motion set, we became intensely playful and inventive. We experimented with paper puppets, underwater sculpture, animating delicate translucent creatures, creating atmospheric scenes with smoke and glitter, wool puppets on snow, 3D-printed translucent shells, playing with the lights… ! The amount of materials we played with creates a high level of complexity that is both challenging and rewarding.
With traditional 2D animation, we breathe life into our characters, one drawing at a time. There is something eternally touching about moving hand drawn images, as if this illusion of life reaches a memory deep in our collective cognition from the time we watched dancing shadows on the cave wall. All of the backgrounds are painted in watercolour and retouched digitally, creating a picturesque world.
It was important to me to create a visual connection between Syd’s reality and his palpable imagination. This link is represented by the papers he uses to draw on, created using VR stopmotion. Syd's imagination is so deeply connected to his emotions, that it transforms his own world. We sculpted 3D models in virtual space then animated them frame by frame, stop motion style. Inside our virtual world, we are free from physical limitations and yet our slightest hand movement is perfectly registered, embracing the charm of stop motion. Material and lighting treatments in 3D give the animation a realistic paperlike look.
Lastly, there is great effort in compositing all the elements together, adding depth and lively movements to the environment, a game of subtlety and precision to make the image just right. The prism light refraction effect ties our different visual universes together - a quiet, almost invisible observer.
What began as a project designed for a few pairs of hands blossomed into a great collaboration. Joining me at different stages and departments within 2 months of intense production were 40 incredibly talented and passionate filmmakers, each infusing their artistry into this creation. Once again, I am completely fascinated, invigorated, inspired by the power of storytelling to bring people together, behind and in front of the screen. Everyone who has participated in the project has brought a lot of heart and talents into the film and I encourage you to find them in the credits.
The transcendence of music truly knows no bounds. Pink Floyd’s musical universe became the beating heart of inspiration, guiding us into uncharted creative territories. I hope you enjoy “The Boy who Cheated Death”, a music video for Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky”, as we have enjoyed making it.
Softwares used:
TVPaint, Blender, Quill, DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Creative Cloud, Dragonframe
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6 сен 2024
