SPANISH FLOWERS
Role: Creative Direction, Illustration, 3D Modelling, Animation
Artist: PhilM
Published: 2019
Happiness at child birth comes along with the pain of existence. Death is shrouded in grief and uplifted by the release of consciousness.
Spanish Flowers (also called Spanish Flores) is a song from the new album by the power trio of Philm, headed by guitarist and singer Gerry Nestler, and bassist Pancho Tomaselli. The track stands out from the rest of the album and Philm’s har- monic distortion of sound as an ambient al elegy to death.
A MUSICAL FILM
We are born at the pain of existence, and to quell the pain our youth tricks us into thinking we'll live forever. When we first face the idea of death, we become a slave to our emotions, shocked by the frailty of life. It is then our duty to succeed our suffering and solidify our memories with acceptance and love.
THE FRAMES
Visually, I wanted to interpret this concept through stark black and white contrasts. The images and spaces created by these contrasts are to carry out an abstract storyline starting at the waters of the womb, transgressing through the tears of loss upon our discovery of death, and ending upon transcending past such suffering.
A lot had happened in the making of this film. I lost my grandmother to cancer. My half-brother exhumed his mother from the grave. I wanted to encapsulate all these lived experiences at the time into a journey of loss, mourning, courage, and transgression into the afterlife.
STITCHING THE FRAMES
Upon reaching a satisfying telling of the story through painted frames, I moved to the difficult task of placing them together in a way that made sense with the music: odd time signatures, wavering, haunting melodies, and fluctuating bass rhythms set the path for the visual journey ahead, and it forced me to become unpredictable in terms of my editing approach. Standard cuts would not work. I had to draw things out to make the story feel like a funeral progression - like a series of deep inhales and exhales until the final breath before the afterlife was released.
MUMMIES, PRIESTS, AND GODDESSES
When thinking about the characters that inhabited the main desert setting, I took heavy inspiration in Mesoamerican and Inca culture, going back to my family roots in Ecuador. I reached out to my uncle, who is an archeologist, and asked him to explain to me everything about Inca mummies and burial rituals. At the same time, I was getting into Alchemy and Dark Souls, both sources of inspiration that led to me creating the priestess and monk characters. The base for these came from more medieval sources, but as I worked with our character artist to further refine them, their garbs started to embody more Native American patterns, which is the vibe I was going for. Ultimately, I wanted the inhabitants of this desert to feel like it's own culture - with its own rituals, traditions, and magic.
BLOCKING OUT THE WORLD
I decided it would be easiest to design all the backgrounds in 3D as it would give me a better sense of scale. I wanted our characters to feel like they were in some for of giant cavern at the start - as if they themselves were inside a crypt with this putrid body, in the stage of death surrounded by dead. Once outside, I could take advantage of Cinema 4D's geometry nodes to create dunes that felt like they kept expanding forever - bringing about the idea of infinity and the afterlife.
Just like the character concepts above, heavy Inca inspiration was used to model the buildings, while the serpent altar itself was modelled after a Chacmool - a Mesoamerican ritual altar employed for many ritual uses, including sacrifices.
PAINTING THE WORLD
Once the 3D world was built, me and my co-director, Fernando Yanes, proceeded to paint over each 3D frame to give the digital blocks a sense of handcraft and extra layer of texture. We made several lighting passes over each frame and added extra background details such as stars by hand. For the final frames, I hand painted many of the assets to give the climax a sort of biblical, angelical feel. I had been reading The Divine Comedy at the time and was taken aback by the renditions of Gustav Dore of Dante's Paradiso - and so I set out to replicate the same fee to the final act of this story.
BRINGING A DESERT TO LIFE
The final frames of this animation had to convey one idea: resurrection. To add on to the theme, my brother (also the bass player for the band) recorded a series of Polish Gregorian Chants during one of his tours in Europe, and added it to the final strip of the song. The chants evoked the color gold into my mind, which is the reason behind the gold lighting and solar rays being created.
Another big component of this scene is of course, the blast of color brought about by a fiery frenzy of peacock flames. Peacocks are a recurring theme in much of alchemical writings, evoking themes of the afterlife, and the opening of "a thousand feathered eyes." In terms of this story, a seed is planted onto the corpse before it is cremated, which is believed by the desert people to bring new life onto the desert. This was my way of remaining hopeful through everything I was going through at the time, and reminding myself that a new life was to greet me around the corner after I had shed my grief through this project.
RAW: DTLA ARTS GALLERY
With the journey concluded, it was time to celebrate. I began to submit my film to a series of festivals in the months that followed, and one of the first galleries I stumbled across was RAW arts gallery in LA - in fact, they contacted me first! Once we made arrangements, we put together a show where I showcased my personal art as well as my film. Me and my Co-Director, Fernando Yanes, attended and decorated our boot with tangible symbolism found in the film. It was an incredible night and a great start to the film festival success our film would embark on.
SOCIALS
We also put together a couple of bite-sized social media reels to advertise both our film, Philm's new album, and the opening of our production studio, Brain Fluid, along with the debut of this film. Overall, the journey of death had brought about a ton of new life and opportunities to my career, and this project will forever be cherished in my creative trajectory as the film that started it all.
CREDITS
