Fifteen Step (Kindersurprise Utopia)    15 April 2008

This is really beautiful. Love how the camera is wanders throught he world that you have created.

Wow, why on earth wasn't this a finalist? Great work. I'm sorry to hear you won't be finishing it.

Looking good. I think that seedling on the airfield scene could be shortened up though, or add some more dynamic angles to keep the viewer captivated.

Maybe the planes after consuming spores, should take off towrad the sun and burst into even more spores. And happier flowers, like straight outta Murakami. But either way this is fantastic.

Last! We chose "15 Step" first because of all the cool instrumentation (theremin! kindergarden "yay" chorus! clanky bits! oddly isolated guitar segment! spooky echos!) and some pretty heavy musical shifts during the song made it very attractive to cut a story to. The theremin is now the sun's "change" theme; first guitar part the dandelion's flight theme; etc. So the story was really built from the noises in the song - what they made us think of.

Now the fluffy stuff. We re-imagined "15 Step" as a song sung to a human-poisoned earth by the sun ("used to be all right... what happened") but rather than make a preachy environmental ballad we wanted to make something much darker - when nature/the sun strikes back, we portray it as almost a hyper-pop trashy kind of cute (J-pop/Takashi Murakami/Chiho Aoshima) but very very sinister at the same time. (We had barely 5 days to pull the animatic together so the animation is only basic basic blocky

So a few explanatory comments. First: Animation by Martin White (www.martylog.com) using Blender. Direction by Alex de Campi. If you want to see what our finished work looks like, hit up "Creator's Other Work" at right to see Alex's, and go here: http://tinyurl.com/25d8ht to see Martin's.

Great stuff - hope to see a final render.

Love it!

Lovely work, as always, Alex! Best of luck!