pierrot
• directed • designed • animated •
client & music
delune
afx compositing
tasha howe
synopsis
lavender too captures the seemingly endless moment of falling love with someone while morse code is a song that captures the fantasy of two isolated and alienated people desperately trying to connect with each other through short messages. coincidentally, i finished the animation around the time of the first global lockdown which gave a whole new meaning to the song.
concept
surrealist & airy, my characters are an androgynous version of the old theatre archetype pierrot and his unreachable love, columbina - two lovers that continuously fall in and out of balance. i sketched out a few different face variations for both characters which we used with delune when pinpointing down how we imagined pierrot and columbina. i then drew out the two finalist couples for them to choose from.
the animated loops are character-driven fantasy sequences packed with references and associations such as columbine with her rose (rene magritte - the son of man) and some very obvious surrealist symbols (the eye, the clouds, the door & window, etc.).
in projects where there is one distinct main character or only a few characters are present, by the time i get to animating their stories, i already love them like my children. i feel their longing, fears, happiness and disappointment as they come to life through the moving frames, which is one of the reasons why i don't work from cafes and public places - my face usually shows it all.
one of my biggest challenges during this project was that since the animated loop repeated itself, it needed to be edited over different parts of the song, and so tasha and i had to find the actual base rhythm. it also largely affected how each loop altered: not all shots repeated every time, and the length of the shots changed, too - kudos to tasha for matching it all up!
starting out, i usually just play the song on repeat and dance all day until it is so ingrained in me that i’m able to draw out the character's moves effortlessly. given that, i was living with lavender too/morse code in
my ears for months, finding myself humming the songs whilst walking my dog in the park.
