Iron Movie, Video and Animation Design · 2020
Preludes Mixed Media Animation
- A' Design Award 2020 Iron Winner in Movie, Video and Animation Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: Matthew Rankin
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 12,566
- Verification code 64F372FE8A · Verify this award
About Preludes Mixed Media Animation
Preludes is a short mixed media animation based on the poem of the same name by T.S. Eliot. The film runs for one minute and eight seconds and pairs Eliot's imagery with an original musical composition. Scenes are linked by theme and by sound rather than by a single visual style. The work combines 2D and 3D animation, modelled in Cinema 4D, rendered with Redshift and composited in After Effects. Aerial views shift to street level, where figures pass one another behind screens. The animation reflects on modern life through an older text.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Preludes is a mixed media collaborative animation based on a poem by T.S. Eliot. The process involved the poem being chosen by the producer, who then invited a musician to compose a one-minute piece which was handed off to me to provide to create visuals on both the the words of Eliot and the music.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Duration: 1-minute, 08-seconds
- Tags
- poetry, animation, motion graphics, 2D, 3D, after effects
- Production Technology
- Preludes utilizes both 2D and 3D animation all composited in After Effects. The scenes with 3D were done in Cinema 4D and rendered using Redshift. It also uses several After Effects plugins such as Video Copilot's Sabre, Rowbyte's Plexus, and Red Giant's Particular and Form.
- Design Challenge
- The challenge became putting the many ways this manifests into only one-minute and matching those visuals to an already created musical composition. And that's how an aerial view helps to alienate us from the tracking signals on the street and we are suddenly shifted to street level view to see faceless people bumping into one another with screens blocking the vision.
- Project Duration
- The project was started 20 December 2019 in New York City and completed in February 2020.
- Operation Flow
- I was immediately drawn into Eliot's non-narrative and slightly abstract form, even though he was describing a very defined and concrete world. I took that as an opportunity to create scenes that were thematically, but not necessarily aesthetically, connected. Instead, I chose to let Macra's soundtrack be the connective tissue weaving together Eliot’s view with my own as I explore how our modern world looks and feels in the context of Eliot’s ideas.
- Research
- For this project the research fairly straightforward. It started with a cursory reading of the poem, Preludes by T.S. Eliot, and listening to the soundtrack created by Angus Macrae. I listened to the audio repeatedly to let it sink into my memory and to help with visualizing general concepts. This was followed by seeking out deeper analysis of the poem so that I better understood the themes, ideas, and symbols. While I could certainly have skipped this step it was profoundly important as I went along and was searching for visual fragments to add to the density of the piece.
- Inspiration
- Preludes is based on T.S. Eliot's poem of the same name and a one-minute musical soundscape provided to me and composed by Angus Macrae. The whole project was organized by a group called Campfire Poetry that uses poetry as away to promote collaborations between musicians and animators.