The Awakening of Consciousness is a wonderfully eclectic film
paying homage to everything from true Asian sensibility to
martial arts movies to computer games. I found myself wondering
what exactly I was looking at part of the time. When I finally
surrendered to the experience, I found I enjoyed it a lot
more. And I suppose that's a Zen awakening of a type, so perhaps
the film did what it set out to do.
A strong cosmic connection exists between Japanese writing
and transcendental meditation. A connection that traces the
bonds between the stream of life and the contrast of the fleeting
nature of our bodies and the perennial life of our eternal
souls.
In
feudal Japan the links between calligraphy, religion and
the art of war were broken by bad interpretations of ancestral
teachings. They caused Japanese society of the time to lose
its equilibrium.
In
that atmosphere of decadence Ryotaro appeared, a young Samurai
who, at an early age, showed a wisdom that dazzled the sagest
scholars of his time. His discipline in the martial arts
was legendary, and could only be compared to his ability
in the mystic calligraphic exercises.
As
has happened to many others down the centuries who have
found enlightenment and who have pursued the truth, he was
persecuted by members of resentful cults whose institutions
his teachings threatened.
One
of his most famous teachings is the parable that narrates
this story.
CLICK TO GO TO THE AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS WEBSITE
"'The
Awakening of Consciousness' is a really modest production.
We are just two guys who decided to make something entertaining
and show it to everybody. We set up a little studio and
started to work. Preproduction was sweet, charaters appeared.
Writing storyboard under Valencia's summer sun was fun and
refreshing, but then we started Production. With the cold
of winter all kind of problems appeared, but we persevered,
and with good humour Santa's gift was the whole short rendered.
Finishing the short and getting good feedback is already
a nice prize.
Our philosophy is in the movie. We do believe in good vibrations
and that's exactly why laughter is the way we chose to get
good feelings from the viewer.
'The
Awakening of Consciousness' was done in 6 months fully dedicated
to it, working 12 hours a day without pay. We realized the
project was large for only two guys, so we looked for help
in some of the forums. We didn't find anyone who fit, so
we just made the film ourselves. It was a daunting task
for only two guys creating almost ten minutes of animation,
not to mention character design, storyboarding, modeling,
and rigging. But at the same time we had a lot of faith
in our idea, so we went ahead.
Still, along the way, we found some collaborators. The first
one was Manolo Sordo, who made a stunning website. This
site helped us to get really talented people like Francois
Jolin for the music who was very interested in joining the
project, and actually has done a great job. The samples
of his music he sent us were incredible, real solid professional
quality. Yet he did it without earning a single gold coin.
Well, he has certainly earned our friendship from this project.
As for the art side, we split the problems fifty-fifty and
this meant that we had to face the same problems at the
same time, so we were able to help each other to solve things
and learn techniques together. For instance, when we had
to do rigging [making the character models obey the movement
of the animation skeleton] the back of Kakato would screw
up, or one of Ryotaro's feet was built in the wrong way.
Things like that were really painful and made us lose a
lot of time, but we learned a lot from solving those problems.
As things went better, we started the animation part. That
was our focus from the start, the part we'd been waiting
for, as we want to be animators for a living. We really
put ourselves into it, and it was as fun as we'd hoped.
We spent Christmas Holidays rendering, and in January we
worked on postproduction and sound. And there you have a
finished short film.
We dreamed in summer, we worked in the winter and we are
feeling happy again in spring."
--Daniel
Ruiz and Santi Hurtado, AUG 2005
