As I mentioned before, The wild fields and the warrior is divided in two narrative levels. I had to seperate them visually.
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 different sorts of paper.
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These ornaments I used for the background layers of the flowerfield scenes.
And some more intricated ones…
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. 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. That 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 design 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.
Designtest with ink and pencil, 2005
Designtest with marker and pencil, 2005
All figures you can see below are actually not mentioned in the original story. I added them to clarify specific parts of the plot.
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.
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.
scarecrow turnaround
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.
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.
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.
Some facial drafts of a warrior. It was not the one I was searching for…
At this point the warrior had a beard after all (but still not the right one all in all) …
These cloth sketches are obviously influenced by some samurai references…
Sideways shape of the early wild fields.
Some sketches to get the proportions of the characters.
The fact Moon Suk, the authoress of The wild fields and the warrior, originates from Korea automatically built an asiatic setting in my mind for the whole plot. For that reason I got inspired by some samurai images. I found them at that time while researching for the design of the warrior. Of course I know the samurai’s origin is in Japan, not Korea. 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 tradition and inspiration.
As you can see below, the warrior took a completely different direction in his development comparing to the character design of the fields. The more they developed separately, 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 apparitional 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 came up with the idea to let some industrial machines do the acting (the warrior would have been a tank who changes into a combine harvester) and many other stuff, but at the end all this seemed to be a little bit too strange and far-fetched to me.
Finally I am quite happy with the result of the warrior’s character design. At least he is the main character of the film. I wanted him to be a physically strong person, but also a bit instable, maybe naive.
These are a few different phases of the warriors development process.
The warrior has got a really wide chest. He looks a bit like a rooster to me in the side view…
Some final impressions of the warrior.
Because the fields are interacting with the warrior, I had to come up with characters that represent the respective field. Firstly I thought about the creation of some real women character 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. Finally I used a collage technique to bring them on paper which would make it difficult to animate the figures frame by frame. Thus I decided to get some motion in it by crossfading the most important keyframes and do the creation of most of the animation later in the compositing.
Development of the main character: the wild fields. At some point it was a consistant decision to show all the fields naked for bringing out their natural being.
Final version of the wild fields.
The flowerfields had to be glamorous and beautiful. I decided to add some butterflies that should always flutter around her.
Final look of the flowerfield.
Vegetablefields
The vegetablefields are my personal favorite. To symbolize fertility of nature I decided they have to be pregnant.
I like the colours of the vegetabelfields and especially the pumpkins and melons.
Potatoefields
The potatoefields were the most difficult. They should look like potatoes somehow but have a sexy appearance anyway.
At last I got the gracious and buxom potatoefields.
Cornfields
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.
Final version of the cornfields.
On sunday, December 13th, The wild fields and the warrior will be shown at the 8th La.Meko Fimfestival in Landau/Pfalz, Germany.
After more than one year that the movie is done now, this will be the premiere in Germany (instead of a little release party in my studio here in munich last year). I’m quite happy about that because it brings back my belief in the liking of good films of the german people 😀
Yesterday the Bolzano ShortFilmFestival started in South Tyrol, Italy. My animation short film The wild fields and the warrior participates in the German-speaking programm “Die kurze Welle” in section I.
I will go there on saturday with Benjamin Scabell, the guy who made some visual effects for The wild fields. I’m very excited, because I never was in Italy before and of course I’m looking forward to look at the audience while watching my movie.
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The wild fields and the warrior is going to be shown at the 7th International Animation Film Festival Tindirindis 2009 which takes place in Vilnius (Lithuania) from October 19-25.
My shortmovie will be screened on sunday, 25th, as part of the special programme “Legends and Affairs”.
…for the animated short film The wild fields and the warrior at the 4th International Young Filmmakers Short Film Festival Vilnius Film Shorts which will take place in Vilnius (Lithuania) from October 1st-4th.
Life is beautiful…