Peace

Animated Short

Client

Collaborative Animation Project

Role

Story
Character Design
Art Direction
Animation

Year

2020

During the Summer of 2020, the pandemic broke out quarantining most of us in our homes. Diaries of Confinement was a project initiated by Herr Prof. Isabel Herguera and her colleagues, friends as a digital seminar-workshop, to collaborate with people from all across the world on an anthology.

We exchanged our personal experiences of quarantine through audio clips (abstract and concrete) and animated each other’s clips out to make tiny films, which were edited together to make the anthology.

My contribution to this collective piece was Peace, a three minute animation based on an audio track by Jiangnan, Jolei and Qian Qian (CAFA).

My interpretation of the audio clip was someone's experience of isolation and confinement and resulting exhaustion. As a result, the mind yearns for a change of locale to escape turmoil. However, upon further conversation with Jolei, it was evident that given our lifestyles, it’s difficult for the modern human to find sustained peace. Even in the desirable placid countryside, you’d find a rooster in a cage.

To create the narrative, I heard the audio over and over, while visualizing it in a familiar space. Following the crumbs, I could develop a plot with sufficient conflict and add the other characters to help in bringing out the conflict and theme even more.

Once the storyline and animatic was approved, I worked on refining the characters a bit more, and started work on the assets and animation.

Rough character design sketches

The environment was modeled in Cinema 4d, Textured on Substance and rendered using Redshift. All the animation stages were completed in eight days. Coloring the characters in watercolors took another three.

🔗 Link to the official Diaries of Confinement Page with the entire film viewable in three parts.

🔗 Link to the official making of video.

Participating art schools- CAFA Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing (China); NID National Institute of Design, Andhra Pradesh (India); Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany); Tecnol-gico de Monterrey, Ciudad de Mexico (Mexico); Universidad Javeriana, Bogota (Colombia); Vilnius Academy of Arts (Lithuania) and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland).

Mentored By

Sekhar Mukherjee
Isabel Herguera
Zilvinas Lilas
Tania De Leon