BEAT (2012)

Creator:

Story, Direction & Animation: Or Bar-El
Drums: Dror Goldstein
Sfx: Joni Bar Ilan
Compositing: Tammuz Kay
Rigging and TD: Yair Halpern

Concept: 

This is Or Bar-El’s graduation film from the Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design, Jerusalem, Israel. The story is mainly about a guy working in a huge cubic world and his job is to draw the same squares again and again. The purpose is to show that sometimes, when people work under a specific situation, the rules may kill their creativity. Like most people in their professional lifetimes will have someone say, “Think outside of the box.” (http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/05/05/beat/) 

Design: 

The designer build a simplified cubic world with a stop motion animation style(1,2,3,4,5), which tells the audiences this character is on behalf of a group of people who have to do their job by a strong rhythm which could not change, like some industry workers in our real life. The box-shaped environment, like the character, table, pen, chair and clock, give people the feeling that everything is boring and that make people’s mind become an empty box as well. For the color, the designer create a gray world which indicate the work is boring and hopeless, however in the character’s heart, the color is bright red, which imply that he does not belong to this world and there is hope inside his mind(6,9). 

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Edit/animation:

The soundtrack plays a significant role in this video. At the beginning, all the animation exactly follows the rhythm i.e. the clock moving, picking up the pen and the drawing process. Additionally, the animation of the camera makes the feeling more obvious especially for the scene for the inner part of the character. Besides, with the 3D tools, that allows for a smooth camera movement to cover the scene while the choppy character animation techniques mimic the soundtrack. Or Bar-El then switches it up during the protagonist’s fantasy sequences, making the movement dynamic and seamless.

 ( http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2012/05/05/beat/) 

When the character realized his inner jazz, the pace becomes faster(9,10,11,12). He struggled to back the original work at first but failed. He trys to control that, however, the feeling is so strong and nothing could stop him from drawing crazily. Finally he find that the sound comes from his heart and after this realization, he embraces the fire inside and continues his capricious behavior. Over all, this is a nice statement for the people who wants to escape the routine of day to day work in all of us. Creativity comes from our chaos and our hearts.

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