Carolina Melis’ video for Oh No Ono’s "Internet Warrior" reveals a graceful dance of mysterious creatures and geometric shapes that draws from her background as an animator and choreographer. Below, she describes her creative process.
The Atlantic: Where do you find inspiration for your animations? How did you develop the idea for this music video?
Carolina Melis: The great side of animation is that you can create extraordinary, magical worlds without limitations. I worked on this video with Alessandro Monaco, when we first heard the song we thought about creating a surreal landscape mixing very old imaginary with sharp, geometrical shapes. The final result has the feel of a natural history documentary, yet it's a journey into a world made of impossible creatures. There are no cuts, we made a choice to move across this environment in a continuous way.
The shells and creatures in the video, although two-dimensional, almost seem to be breathing with the rhythm of the music. How do you go about animating these collages of images and geometric shapes?
My background is in choreography and I tend to devise my animations as dance pieces. This means that timing is extremely important and I think about motif, variations, dynamic, space.
Where did you find the sea creature at the beginning of the video?
We started with a couple of found images. I collect this image from a market ages ago' and it had been in my studio for a while waiting for a casting. We thought about what we could place next to them in order to create an interesting friction. Then we looked at the overall picture and we decided to create the sense that we were in front of a small window into a much larger world.
Once we established the overall look and feel we had to find a way to create something totally unexpected, hence we introduced the colours in the last part.
What’s next for you?
Beside the commercial work, I'm now developing a series for children; it's all animated and very musical, hopefully it should be done by the end of the year.
For more video by Carolina Melis, see http://www.carolinamelis.com/.
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