IN SEARCH OF THE SIGNS IN THE COFFEE
The starting point of this movie was the concept of
"reading in the coffee cup " in french "lire dans le marc de cafe"
It was a known tradition back in Mediterranean countries .
and it goes way back .
Basically its turkish coffee that you pour in a cup .
Its advised that you drink it (if you want your divination to work on your behalf )
and then tip it over and wait .
15 minutes later, you tip it back and admire the
coffee stains that got stuck all over your cup .
Thats the part where the " reader of the cup" trips over those graphics and creates a
whole interpretation to what he sees.
Ive always been fascinated by this tradition that so many people took too seriously.
I was more impressed by the beauty of the graphics from the stains .
Once we formed our group (Lionel Caruana ,Bastien Martin and Aurelien Gueroult who was later replaced by
Margaux Demont ) we started developing the idea further.
We wanted to be able to transform this ritual into something greater than it is .
Its something to have some bored women perform this ritual on their balconies in the morning
but to have an actual leader of a city depend on its interpretations in order to better impose his rules ,
that took the tradition on another level.
a more serious one .
We took our search further into megolamanic leaders that are obsessed with their principles
and that defend them to the end .
We came across famous leaders like Alexander , Napolean , Hitler , Edi Amin ...
all which had one point in common .
Obssession with a threat , a menace .
An Obssession that ended up taking over them and ending their reign.
From there on we decided to personify this paranoia by using a second character
that represents all the extreme flaws in his personality .
This character we named "the other "interpreted the stains and made them darker then what they
really are.
Each stain he interprets, carries a different threat and imposes a regulation on his people .
Naturally , his people whom we decided will stay blinded puppets until one of them dies, wake up and act out.
Their revolt only troubles the leader more , and by erasing the stain he thinks hel save his city once again .
Only then he finds himself face to face with all the illusions he himself created.
Delusions and reality are merged . His people which are represented by crabs in his illusion finally come together to eat him alive and with that destroy him and his entire city.
IN SEARCH OF A GRAPHIC STYLE
One thing we knew we wanted was a 2d illustrative style that allows
us to experiment with textures to give a handmade look and feel.
Lionel , one of our talented group members was able to take his 3d technical researches further and
allowed us to recreate a 2d representation with fidgeting borders like in real 2d animation.
We fed on a lot of 2d animators and illustrators like Caroline Leaf, Alberto Breccia , Toccofondo ,
the great Shaun Tan,Marco WAgner... Artists like Egon Schiele,Gustav Klimt, Reza Abedini, Friedensreich Hundertwasser were of great inspiration for textures , colors and compositions.
and ofcourse we were highly inspired by German Expressionism; the "Clair obscure "graphic treatment of their movies Metropolis, the Cabinet of Dr caligari, M le maudit ..Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove was also a huge inspiration for the study of character development and so on ..
So finally we had to lay out our restrictions to maintain our intentions :
-Animation was going to be in step , and baked to give the impression of having it in 8 frames per second (like in real painted animation ).
-Very few elements were modeled in 3d .
Most of the environments that I painted were reprojected in 3d by using the process of cam mapping .
And others were later added in the compositing process.
-We withheld ourselves from using any realistic stock shots and did every animated textures by hand using sand , acrylics on water , ink , milk ..anything we laid our hands on that we filmed with an Hd camera.
Here are some researches for character designs , and graphic style ..
