Summer Bliss
2021
In my final year at University I had the opportunity to create my own short animated film from start to finish. My main inspiration for this project was the Mediterranean Sea. I wanted to portrait a sunny and colourful environment, close to the sea, and to capture that feeling of bliss and tranquility that comes from elated idleness. Or, as the Italians say, "il dolce far niente".
My central focus for this project was the art direction. I wanted to create something stylised, geometric inspired, that would reflect the kind of work I'd be interested to get into after graduating. So over time during pre-production both my environment and character designs became progressively simpler.
As for the character, I wanted to give her a "femme fatale" kind-of-look, considering her role by the end of the film. I played with shapes and proportions until I came up with a final design: tanned, bulky but curvy and elegant, a hat that partially covers her cat-like eyes, white swimsuit, red lips.
Finally, considering the style of the whole piece was the focal point and that I was going to produce it in 3D, I had to find a way to achieve a less standard final result. After coming across some experiments done by the designer Liron Ashkenazi-Eldar using Cinema4D, I decided to take these as inspiration and follow the same aesthetic: flat colours and graphite-textured shadows. So everything was animated using Maya and textured and rendered using C4D. Check my pre-production journey here: https://issuu.com/mcardosoo/docs/art_of_summer_bliss