Role: Creative Direction, Illustration, Animation
Company: Brain Fluid
Published: 2021
The root of all civilizations started at the sunrise of mankind, when the first stone men gazed at their star and realized they existed.
Brain Fluid is not just a studio, it is a project dedicated toward advancing human evolution via digital animation, and cinematic storytelling. Humanity’s first stories were frozen in the caves of time and the obelisks of Egypt, wherein our modern era etches glyphs and simplified archetypes onto every shirt, screen, and virtual space of society.
Communication has advanced to the point of reducing entire ideas to a single word or vector, but for the glyph to become timeless, it must relate to a myth. With this myths we recover the ancient secrets of the past, while uncovering the road ahead. We have been storytellers since our notion of time began, and it is here where the story of Brain Fluid begins.
MAKING A GRAND OPENING
When it came to our logo, we thought really hard about the world we wanted to build around it - a mystical world called Crea whose founding myth was intrinsically tied to art and felt ancient like the native american landscapes that inspired our designs. We wanted this world to inform our title sequence, social media, logo, and brand. Thus, our grand opening would be our first glimpse into this world, and it had to convey the enormity and depth of it's lore, history, and ancient past.
SKETCH, LINEART, COLOR
The main inspiration behind the setting seen here can be found in the Amazon rainforest in our native home of Venezuela - the soaring Tepuys. These ancient structures were believed by the natives to be the stumps of giant trees that had been cut down by the Gods. We wanted to portray that myth by imbuing the face our Tepuy with the profiles of ancient stone heads, as if the Gods had come down from the heavens and chiseled this monument in their image. At the summit, we can see three stone heads reminiscent of the easter egg island, and also a direct allusion to us as the three founders of the studio: Nestor, Fernando, and Fanny.
The theme of stone & statues will be prevalent throughout our animation, as we believe that anything that is memorable is solid in its concept, and timeless in its approach to story.
THREE DIMENSIONS
To bring our stone heads to life, our 3D wizard and concept artist, Fernando Yanes, set out to design the three statues in Flash. Once realizing that traditional cell animation would be too timing consuming, he sought to re-make the statues in 3D. The challenge then became to have our statues match the painterly environment we set out to create around them. In order to match both styles, Fernando created a node shader system that added an extra layer of cartoon shading to the stones which made them feel more graphic, and less 3D.
3D TO REAL LIFE
Given that we made our main, stone-faced characters seen in the video out of 3D polygons, we wanted to add additional texture in order to give our statues a rougher, less processed feel that would ground them in some semblance of reality.
This ended up in both me and Fernando, to go scouting for rocks out in Stoney Point, Chatsworth CA. This arid backyard gave us a good diversity of smooth and rough stone textures to play with and add to our Blender models in post.
BEHIND THE SCENES
To give this phenomenally fun project the attention it deserved, we partnered with NoSleepCreative to produce a behind the scenes video that includes all of the 2D and 3D crossbreeds of animation and compositing we used in order to create our tiny Universe.
We also delve into the design process behind our logo, our adventures in Stoney Point and our overall design philosophy. If you're bored of flipping through process pages, or are simply a much better video watcher, engage with the Youtube link down below and immerse yourself into the magic Behind the Keyframes!
LORE THROUGH FRAMES
After our studio launched, we wanted to continue building the lore surrounding our world and turn it into our a social strategy. We felt we could use the social grid as a series of 'windows' into an alternate reality - a world governed by the laws of art as opposed to the laws of physics. We developed a series of concepts that showcased a different aspect of our world - vehicles, landscapes, magic, buildings, goddesses, and the creation of life. Each delved into a deeper aspect of our lore, and added an extra page to our Art Bible.
THE MAP
To thread it all together, I set out to draw & paint the map our our world of Crea. I started with the world's First Age wherein nearly the entire land was submerged under water, and the landmasses were a mere collection of colorful archipelagos. The legend was that one of the Gods of creativity, Iru, was given this small planet as a mercy by the other Gods to create in solace. Be cast out by the other Gods, Iru began to weep, and his deluge of colorful tears filled the once barren land with a sea of color where creativity could spring into life.
THE CREATORS
Behind it all and under the grace of Lord Iru, stand the three mortal avatars of creativity: The Wizard Painter Zadoc, The Monk Ink Master Enu, and the Necromancer Sculptor Basha. Each one is an avatar of our own creativity, and the personas that represent us in Crea.
Together we form Brain Fluid.
CREDITS
Studio Founders: Nestor Tomaselli, Fernando Yanes, Fanny Vicencio
Creative Lead: Nestor Tomaselli
3D Lead, Co-Director: Fernando Yanes
Animation Lead, Character Design: Fanny Vicencio