WEAVER: THE COLOR OF CADENCE

WEAVER: The Color of Cadence was a capstone project at Arizona State University for my senior year, and was created by a team of six (including myself) in two semesters. At the time, many of us were unsure of what the future would look like after college, and to put it simply, it scared us. That fear is what led me to the original concept of WEAVER - bounty hunters that could kill your fears.

The objective of the film was to get the viewer thinking about their own fears - in many ways, WEAVERS (the fear-killers) were the villains of the original draft. They would remove a fear from a person without said person understanding themselves first. The Outlaw - one of two main characters - was the exception to the rule. He would allow his clients to overcome their fears themselves, helping them along the way instead of doing the job for them. We ran into some time constraints that led us to cut the intro scene with his motivations, but his character still remains intact in the final version of the film.

Mari, the other main character, was in many ways written around the fears and quirks of my own team. Most of us were afraid of time, and a few of us had people in our lives with little time left. So, Mari feared time too. Her grandfather - one of the few people left in her family - was dying. Mari's character went through a lot of iterations - she needed to be relatable to the audience, but without being a self-insert character. I think this balance turned out great in the end, but it was a challenge to get it to that point - I rewrote parts of the script multiple times to get it to where it is now.

Color was a very important part of the film for symbolic reasons, and as such, I did a lot of color work on the landscapes seen throughout the film. The bleak sands of the dream world needed to be able to shift colors from white, red, yellow, and blue, so I asked the main animators to export their renders in many layers. Those layers allowed me to completely override the colors of the landscape and CHRONO without affecting the other characters in the scene, and I was also able to add effects directly to Mari through the same layering. Getting those layers exported properly was more challenging than anticipated due to the way we rendered the character's outlines, but the result was well worth it.