Camp Bestival Finale 2011 - Fireworks & Animation Mapping from brightonart on Vimeo.
Camp Bestival 2011This was the first year I teamed up with Kate Genevieve of CHROMA, BrightonART and Two Tigers Fireworks to create the animation side of the Camp Bestival finale - a music, fireworks and video show to be projected onto Lulworth Castle, Dorset, as the closing event of the UK's biggest family festival. The festival had a medieval theme this year, so we decided to tell a tale of knights, princesses and dragons, but with a bit of a twist on the usual roles as we wanted both the Prince and Princess to fight the dragon, and our Princess to be the one to rescue her Prince. Designing the human characters was good fun and I went through a good few designs to find our final style and character. The dragon was even better as I've always had a soft spot for dragons, and while this one was certainly the antagonist of the show, he couldn't be too mean or scary given the age of many of the children attending, so he ended up being more sly and mischievous than evil. As animation for projection tends to be most successful when bold, flat colours are used, we tried to keep the palette bright and festival-inspired but on the right side of garish. As well as the hand-drawn animation, we also had some sections created in a cut-out style for variation, so I had to translate the style of the hand-drawn characters into puppets along with many new knights and heraldic beasts for a big-finish can-can dance at the very end.
Below is the 'Dragon Fight' footage with my 2D Flash animation and additional After Effects animation in the fire and smoke composited in and with audio. These scene was the most fun to work on in the film, and the animation is clearer to see before projection.
