Calling the Wind by Trudy Ludwig & Kathryn Otoshi

A heartfelt book about loss and hope that starts out somber. The effects could not be too exuberant at the beginning. The last shot becomes more uplifting, which we showed with the upward motion of a boy’s head and the energy of picking up the phone.

The focus here was on bringing the book’s original illustrations to life using a combination of techniques. Some items, like a hand motion, are first isolated and then articulated. Other elements were done with image deformations as if the artwork were on a rubber sheet. Some motions were controlled procedurally, being driven by a sine function or a paced random number generator. Others were specifically choreographed with animation curves. Pan and zoom camera moves are a key part of the storytelling. The software used was Nuke, the premier visual effects compositing software used by all major film studios.

Lunch Every Day by Kathryn Otoshi

A compassionate look at why a child might behave like a bully at school, and how acts of kindness can heal. The technical challenge was working with the “sketchy” nature of the artwork, which appears to be a complex blend of watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil. Preserving the original artistic intent of the character edges while isolating and animating them was most challenging. The effects ranged from simply rustling tree leaves outside of a window to fully articulating characters walking away from the camera. Since the characters were drawn with ground shadows, those shadows had to be removed and replaced with dynamically generated shadows that matched the original artwork. The end shot included a full 3D model of the book that was flown in to dock dramatically next to the rotating book reviews.

Holy Spirit Rising: The Vital Return of Our Divine Mother for the Healing of Our Planet

For this spiritual book, about the loss of the Divine Feminine, we decided that a combination of live action and animation would be the most powerful introduction. The visual challenge was to represent spiritual concepts with symbology and motion. The Yin Yang symbol was shown to have lost its balance in the world twice. This entailed changing its internal shape to depict the Yin overwhelming the Yang in one case and succumbing to it in the other. These symbol deformations were accompanied by a transition in the background to further suggest the loss of planetary health and harmony, as it started with a bright blue sky, then transitioned to a dull grey. The book cover treatment required the flame elements of the main artwork to undulate to suggest fire. This was done by isolating selected flame elements, then deforming them with an image noise generator.

Music by Ilka de Gaast