Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 29, 2017. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
The basic idea behind Dissonance is to mix live action and animation on a larger scale than previously known. At the beginning of the film, there are mainly 3D animation scenes with full-CG environments, the lemur character and a spherical city. Till Nowak, for example, built the latter from 15 buildings using camera mapping based on photographs. These are real buildings from cities such as Dresden, Seoul and Sydney.
As the film progresses, the animated portion becomes smaller in favour of live action. The Dissonance team needed a total of ten days of filming in various cities for this. As a result, for most of the film, an oversized CG head with flowing hair sits on a human body. To achieve this, Till Nowak had to track the CG head frame by frame onto the body filmed in real life. A total of 50 people worked on Dissoncance. The trusted 3D tool was 3ds Max. He even created the hair with the software’s Hair & Fur tool.
Background Information
The first conceptual work on Dissonance began back in 2007. Ten years later, the entire film is online and has since won countless prizes, such as an animago AWARD in the “Best Short Film” category. The film mixes and jumps between an animated fantasy world and the real world. The plot for the surreal part was intended to be a phenomenon that actually exists. The background to the story is therefore a musician suffering from psychosis. The animated part is therefore a symbol of the illness. A deliberately chosen cinematic stylistic device is the underwater look of the hair, which symbolises the feeling of dreaming in the pianist’s psychosis.
We spoke to Till Nowak last year. You can download the full interview here. Enjoy reading! You can learn more about Till Nowak and his work on his homepage.
