Desire breeds vision.
Sight with grasping hands,
And feed within arms reach.
Titan is the story of this cycle, illustrating the interplay between several of its permutations; a cloud of krill, a whale, fisherman, and their environment.
Currently in development, this film will combine traditional as well as 3D animation, 2D fx/compositing and digital illustration. It is the most recent product of my ongoing musical collaboration with programmer, musician and artist Walter Harris. What began solely as an attempt to rebuild a functional musical partnership through the internet eventually yielded the process by which Titan was imagined.
Interestingly, the inability to physically play in the same space, combined with the flexibility of digital audio production strengthened our desire to compose, and much more time was spent actually discussing the ideas and emotions to be expressed that traditionally would have been developed through jam sessions in a practice space.
This process lent itself to becoming increasingly visual as well as narrative to facilitate communication. We eventually found that developing narrative structures was a key motivator in our mode of production. Narrative inspired composition is certainly not new, as many bands have often cited such inspiration for their work. What may be unique for our process in this regard is that developing visual and thematic ideas outside of a practice space was the only way to energize the creative process over such a distance.
We needed to build the stories we wanted to play.
Before long, I started doodling:
This image was the first visual result of this collaboration, acting as a style frame for the rest of the project. The storyboard was finished at the beginning of 2012 resulting in the animatic above.
© Eric Smallwood 2012
