BlackCherry Vissi d'arte Blog Part I

VISSI D'ARTE

Vissi d’arte is the culmination of a three year effort on the part of John Mark Seck and the animation team at BlackCherry Digital Media. “I had the idea of combining my love of classical music with animation for some time,” said Seck. “Opera has always been about spectacle and so 3D animation and opera seemed a good fit. When we started the initial planning for the company this was one of the projects I was hoping to get off the ground. I thought it would be a great way to showcase the animation team we had put together.”

Funding for the project was the initial hurdle to overcome. An application for Bravo!FACT funding was initially turned down but the jury suggested re-applying. Six months later the initial funding came through from Bravo! and was supplemented by the NFB (National Film Board) Filmmaker Assistance Program. Private investment rounded out the budget.

With the funding in place the project was ready to move forward. The key creative team consisted of John Mark Seck – Producer/Director, Alberto Garcia – Art Director/Lead TD, Kathleen Radke – Vocalist, Rob Frayne and Alvaro di Minaya – Composers and Dimitri Gagnon Morris – Storyboard Artist.

With the key team in place the adaptation was created. The team settled on the aria Vissi d’arte from Tosca by Puccini. It was a great choice because it was a familiar aria and the story of Tosca is a rich one with a universal theme: art and love. “I really wanted to tell the story of the opera in a contemporary setting, one that would make the theme more accessible to a new generation,” said John Mark Seck. “Our initial brainstorming led to the concept of a graffiti artist taking the central role of Tosca.”

“The adaptation came together fairly quickly after we decided on the aria. Essentially, I wanted to tell the story of the entire opera, rock video style in a three to four minute short,” said Seck. The challenge was to bring something new to the story. “As great as the opera was, I thought I’d still like to add a new magical element, something that spoke about the power of art to create magic. This was achieved with the garden scene. Other than that addition the story pretty much follows that of the opera.”

After the adaptation was complete it was time to move on to storyboarding and character design. “We wanted to create two worlds that were polar opposites,” said Seck. “One was the gritty urban environment and was the other the pastoral garden. I’d always felt this short should show anime influences. The garden scenes were inspired primarily by the cherry blossom scenes in Dreams by Akira Kurosawa.”

With the storyboards complete it was time to create a digital animatic. At every stage along the process the BlackCherry team tried to maintain a digital workflow. “In some ways we were laying down a new process for ourselves,” said Alberto Garcia, Art Director and lead TD. “While the animation pipeline is a fairly established process there are always new ways to approach things. The digital animatics we created for this short were almost the equivalent of pre-viz more commonly associated with feature film.”

“The cool thing is, you take things like the storyboards and animate them and you end up with a piece of art that could stand on its own. We often joked at different stages of the projects we’ve worked on – why don’t we just stop here, it looks great,” added Seck.