-Interview by Steve Ogden
What do
you get when a group of South African artists blend Eastern art, extinct
creatures, a huge, tentacled monster, and a white mouse named Eddy the
Engineer as an unlikely hero? You get something very unusual. There
are Creation Myths that explain the mysterious and the grand. The Blackheart
Gang, on the other hand, has given us the "Tale of How", which
tells the legend of something a bit different.
This insanely
detailed and bewildering film features mythical creatures in a mystical
underground realm who owe their existence to soapy water. It's the story
of how the Parana Birds (that's "Do-dos" to you and me) are
rescued from the Tentacled Monster Otto by Eddy the Engineer, in a realm
called The Household. The main order of miraculous business in The Household,
of course, is to purify our bath water and make our soap.
Say
it sounds odd, and I say you don't know the half of it. In fact, The
Blackheart Gang would say you don't know a fraction of it, because this
film is actually only the second part of a three part story. That story
in turn is part of a larger, more ambitious epic which tells the complete
legend of The Household.
"We
really hope to inspire people," says Jannes Hendrikz, Compositor
and Creative Director for the BHG. "This project was about beauty,
sincerity and passion. We want to share that. And hopefully, for just
a moment, pull people out of the chaos they have grown so accustomed
to." The tool these artists have chosen to pull us out of "the
chaos"? Four minutes of chaos of their own design.
|
Say
it sounds odd, and I say you don't know the half of it. In fact,
The Blackheart Gang would say you don't know a fraction of it...
|
The
team was greatly influenced by old Eastern art, and wanted to capture
that ancient illustrative look in the film. But it took them an awful
lot of work to get it.
First,
illustrator Ree Treweek drew all the elements with pen on paper, scanned
them, and coloured them in Photoshop. Then, Hendrikz built 3D environments
in After Effects, animated Treweek's 2D elements, and composited live
action elements, like splashing water, into the scene. "We spent
a lot of time blending the 2D elements and live action to create a living
world with depth and dynamics. Environmental elements like caustics
and volume light, helped to achieve this look," says Hendrikz.
