woodsywerks

'Simran'

3D Animation

Animated video designed for 'Without Shape Without Form' Exhibition. Shown in the 'V&A Dundee', 'Tramway' Glasgow, 'The Kelvingrove Museum', Glasgow and 'Cromwell Place', Kensington, London.

Without Shape Without Form are an arts organisation who teach knowledge of wellbeing and positivity stemming from their roots in Sikhism. I was commissioned by Artistic Director of WSWF, Deep K Kailey who wrote the script and read the voiceover herself. I was able to draw a storyboard and design everything around this script. This process was carefully designed and planned incorporating time for research and development, presenting designs, style frames and using Storyboards and animatics.

The concept of the video is inform the viewer about the practice of Simran, a focussed practice for the mind. The project needed to explain how our minds are easily confused and distracted by random and sometimes negative thoughts. This was explained visually with abstract shapes of different kinds coming together to form different characters representing some of the distracting thoughts we all have.

In the Sikh faith, there are 5 types of thought distractions that infiltrate the human mind. We decided that those 5, sex, anger, greed, attachment, ego could be represented by characters. But I came to the conclusion that as these larger concepts of thought are made from lots of little thoughts it would be great to make those characters out of little shapes that could be separated and used to represent the thoughts we have in other scenes. This was good in more than one way as it made sense conceptually but also helped me to design some really unique shapes which added to the unique quality of the video.

The main character I designed for this project looks quite alien like but represents the self, all of us. We had to pick a look for a figure that has no particular race, sex or identity. We also had to make it fun and memorable. The character had to guide us through the video, demonstrating various actions, levels of concentration and a sense of serenity in different settings.

The video ends with a demonstration of Simran, a focussed practice for the mind,in which the audience is invited participate.

All scenes and characters were made initially with hand drawn sketches and imagery made with Adobe Illustrator, for approval. I was given artistic freedom to then further the designs by making style frames in 3D using Cinema 4d and Redshift Renderer. Once all scenes were discussed and confirmed I built all scenes and animated them in Cinema 4d. Then further animations were added in AfterEffects compositions and edited.

This project was a key component of the WSWF tour which traveled through Scotland and England in 2022/23. Videos like this can reallly make a difference when trying to explain a concept with any level of complexity in a simplified, understandable way.