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Mein Animationskurzfilm ist jetzt auch auf DVD erhältlich.

Er kann im Online-Shop der Autorin Moon Suk bestellt werden.

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Finally…
Enjoy!

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You can also watch it as The wild fields and the warrior with english subtitles.

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Setdesign

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As I mentioned before, The wild fields and the warrior is divided in two narrative levels, which I had to seperate visaully.

Below, you can see some images of the setdesign. In this step I defined the coloration, the lighting and tested a little bit concerning the textures, which I generated at last with some digitised structures of paper.

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These ornaments I used for the background of the flowerfield scenes.

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Some more intricated ones...

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Design- and early linetests

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At some point of the production it turned out that I would need two narrative levels.

One part should be animated in a classical frame-by-frame style. In those parts the story would be told only by the warriors acting (except of the dormouse and the crows of course as I mentioned before).

In the other part a narrator had to tell the story. It should help me to submit the more complicated contexts of the plot. Only in here the figures of the fields appear and I decided to animate those parts in a cross-fading technique and fit it together in After Effects. This had the useful sideeffect of not needing to animate the fields frame by frame which would have been very complex.

I was trying different materials and techniques. The sequences of the warrior should look like they were inked on paper. I chose a monochrome coloration for that.
The cross-fading parts should be a little bit more colourful and I wanted to have some more depth in the pictures. So I decided to split the screen into different layers which I used like theater culisses and inserted some camera movements to further the plasticity of the scenes.

To manage a smooth transition from one narrative level into another, I had to come up with some special actions in which something or somebody covers the camera for a moment.
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Designtest with ink and pencil, 2005
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Designtest with marker and pencil, 2005
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Secondary characters

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All characters you can see below are actually not mentioned in the original story. I added them to clarify specific parts of the plot.

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The dormouse is living in an old stump on the wild fields. It's interacting with the warrior as a part of nature in the animated sequences of the movie, where I don't show the fields.

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The warrior is building a scarecrow of his armor. This should show the point when he gets really deep into nature and detach himself from former behaviours.

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scarecrow turnaround

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I choosed the crows to be a recurring symbol for nature and also used them once for changing the narrative level from the animated sequence to one of the cross-fading parts in which the fields appear.

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The butterflies are also used for changing the narrative level and leading us to the flowerfields. Those are surrounded by butterflies to bear out their magical and extraordinary beauty.

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Doodles

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I found some more early sketches of the fields and the warrior when I was looking for the concepts of the secondary characters. It’s interesting how deep you can get into a figure, digging for its character, turning out specific attributes over hours and days … just to realize that it’s not the one.

So you have to start it all over again.

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Some facial sketches of a warrior. It was not the one I was searching for...

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At this point the warrior had a beard after all (but still not the right one all in all) ...

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These cloth sketches are obviously influenced by some samurai references...

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Sideways shape of the early wild fields.

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Some sketches to get the proportions of the characters.

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The warrior

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The fact that the authoress of The wild fields, Moon Suk, is Korean, automatically build an asiatic setting in my mind for the whole plot. For that reason I got inspired by some samurai images I found at that time (of course I know the samurais origin is in Japan, but I didn’t want to create a scenery with a specific historical background anyway, so I felt free to explore all kinds of asian inspiration).

As you can see below, the warrior took a completely different direction in his development comparing to the fields. The more they developed seperatly, the better it worked for the story. Because the warrior had to symbolize the real world it was obvious to draw him more concrete than the fields and give him an outline which defines exactly the warriors shape.

During the process of designing the characters I also thought about totally abstract ways of telling the story. For example I had the idea to let some machines acting (the warrior would have been a tank who changes into a combine harvester) and many other things, but at the end all this seemed to be a little bit too strange to me.

Finally I am happy with the result, at least the warrior is the main character of the film. I wanted him to be a physically strong character, but also a bit instable, maybe naive.

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Some different phases of the warriors development.

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He's got a really wide chest...

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Final impressions of the warrior.

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THE FIELDS

Because the fields are interacting with the warrior, I had to create some characters that represent the respective field. Firstly I thought about real women living on the fields. But soon I felt that the charm the story has to convey would suffer through this concrete execution.

So I went more and more abstract. At last those mystic and spectral but also magical and beautiful beings occur in my mind. I used a collage technique to bring them on paper which would make it difficult to animate them frame by frame. Thus I decided to get some motion in it by crossfading the most important keyframes and do most of the animation in the compositing.

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The wild fields

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Development of the wild fields. At some point it was a consistant decision to show the fields naked for bringing out their natural being.

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Final version of the wild fields.

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The flowerfields

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The flowerfields had to be glamorous and beautiful.

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The final flowerfield.

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The other fields

The vegetablefields

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The vegetablefields are my personal favorite. To symbolize fertility of nature I decided they have to be pregnant.

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I like the colours of the vegetabelfields and especially the pumpkins and melons.

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The potatoefields

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The potatoefields were the most difficult. They should look like potatoes somehow but have a sexy appearance anyway.

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At last I got the gracious and buxom potatoefields.

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The cornfields

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The cornfields weren't easy, too. Because of their pretty angular shape they seemed not very attractive to me. So I was glad about the idea for the crown of corn, which makes them looking a little bit like a showgirl.

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Final version of the cornfields.

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Finally I am about to put my shortfilm from 2008 Die wilden Felder und der Krieger (The wild fields and the warrior) on my vimeo account.

Currently I’m rendering some different sizes of two versions (the original in german and a second one with english subtitles), which will take a while. To reduce the time of waiting I’ll post some facts and informations about the development and the production of the movie, over the next few days.

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Patrik and Jens working at The wild fields in my little studio in Leipzig (2007)

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