Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire - Mukudzei
STUDIO / Triggerfish, Saturday Animation
CLIENT / Disney+
ROLE / Art Director
I had the great privilege of art directing episode 6, Mukudzei, for the Disney+ sci-fi anthology called Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire!
While working remotely from Vancouver, I oversaw the project from the start and was fortunate enough to contribute to the art direction of the film, early concepts and visual development, assisting in ideas and solutions for the script and storyboards, leading a team of really talented concept artists who worked in multiple times zones across the globe and led the awesome team at Saturday animation in Montreal to final completion of the short.
My responsibilities included art direction, world building, visual development, story assistance, production planning, artist recruitment, 3D conceptualization, character design, environment design, vehicle design, color scripting and much more! I like to try it all and on this project…I really got to!
research and Visual Development
When I first started on this project, I worked closely with directors Pious Nyenyewa and Tafadzwa Hove when I set out to design the world of Mukudzei. It was very important to me that I try my best to understand what made their story personal to them and how I could best represent their vision, both cinematically and emotionally. We worked on opposite sides of this planet so for me it was crucial that I get to know them not just as my directors but also as good people.
I spent a lot of time talking to them, joking and laughing with them, learning about their pains and struggles, their past experiences, and what they nerded out about. I did my best to understand and familiarize myself with everything I could about the geography, cultural practices, mythology, art and stories of Zimbabwe and I asked them many questions(maybe too many!) so that I could do the best I could to create a futuristic vision that, hopefully, someone could look at and be inspired by.
Here are the first four visual development concepts that I pitched to Pious and Taf in the first couple of weeks of starting on the project.
pitch the look
Once I pitched the early concepts and received a good reaction, I set out to create a painting that could hopefully capture the feeling of the final film. I really love hard sci-fi, such as The Matrix and Akira and the directors also shared their love of film noir so I pitched a look that was a bit more realistic while still being stylized. The realism brought out the amazing texture of the characters skin, the texture of the stone, which is so important in the history of Great Zimababwe. I wanted to capture a feeling of grand, impossible scales for the future and merging that with patterns found in the great textures of Zimababwe felt like the right way to go.
break it down now!
The vision clear and the team assembled, we set out to bring this amazing world to life! I was very fortunate to lead an amazing concept art team, who put their hearts and souls into this project. The characters and worlds they created everyday blew me away and I knew that we all had to work hard as a team to stay true to those amazing concepts. I’m very proud of the work they created and cherish the collaborative energy we had as a team. While my awesome team was designing the final characters, environments props and vehicles, I was lucky enough to sneak in some concepts and sketches during the design stage. Here are a handful that I enjoyed creating.
Story
As an art director, I find it so gratifying to work with other storytellers. Weaving visuals and the written word is such a puzzle and through honest collaboration and problem solving, I think we achieved a great synthesis for Mukudzei. I was very fortunate to get Philippe Guyenne to join the team as Storyboard Supervisor and we had such a blast bouncing ideas and sketches between us. Early on in the project before Philippe joined, I had done an initial story sketch pass for the first version of the script. My main reason for this was to just generate ideas and compositions that I could potentially use later on as keyframes and so I was surprised when Philippe asked if he could use them as a reference. It’s really great when you work with someone that is totally open to collaboration and I really appreciated that about Philippe. It’s also very humbling to see that some of my sketches inspired some shots in the final short film, such as frame number 17, which became the grand entrance to the Great Dzimbabwe city!
The Hungwe
Since day one, I knew the Hungwe, the mechanical fish eagle, would be one of the most daunting tasks for the team. For that reason, early on I sketched out these quick rough designs to pitch to Pious and Taf so that we could start seeing what would work and what wouldn’t. Once we had our rough initial direction, Segun Samson, Nik Hagialas and I collaborated on the Hungwe and brought the concept to final. From there, I worked very closely with Cedric Dubois and Alejandro Castiblanco to bring t he Hungwe from 2D to 3D. I worked mainly in Blender and we would pass the model back and forth, each time improving the proportions, designs elements, aerodynamics and slowly bringing out the character from all the mechanical details.
Matte Painting
As we got the world fleshed out in 3D, we started to get lot’s of matte paintings planned out. Enzo Minarro, Surendra Rajawat and I handled all the matte paintings on the short film and these two were my favorites that I got to work on.
color script
One aspect that I was always looking forward to was creating the color script. I love the challenge of looking at the short film from an eagles perspective and figuring out the puzzle of color, values, pace and story. As I was quite busy leading the team, I was lucky to get the assistance of Enzo Minarro early on so that we could get the color script started as soon as possible. He helped me start on sequences 4 and 5 of this color script and then I took it from there. He did an amazing job and a lot of this script is inspired by his early take. Many thumbprints are on this color script and it was a true team effort to get to this final version!
final_final!
After a lot of hard work, learning, failing, stressing, laughing and designing, the short film is out into the world! It’s an amazing feeling to be able to share this remarkable story that Pious and Taf created and we are so proud of the final look that we all created.
