Four dandelion seeds, catapulted from planet Earth after a nuclear apocalypse, search for a new home in the stratosphere. When the migrant seeds are sucked into a black hole, they find themselves on a planet both ominous and unusually beautiful. The seeds travel on slugs, flee from voracious floating tadpoles, and search for land where they can take root.
Director's Statement
To create each image in Planets, I use a variety of techniques ranging from time-lapse and hyper slow motion, to ultra-macro, stackshot, and robotics. Time-lapse is, precisely, the art of compressing time. It involves filming a very slow natural phenomenon, often imperceptible to the naked eye, over a given period. Speeding up the footage, we can “finally” see the invisible. Hyper slow motion, on the other hand, is the art of unfolding time. Like time lapse, the (phantom) camera captures very rapid movements and breaks them down. The subject filmed thus becomes “something else”. Here, technique is not just a tool to enhance what we see, it reveals what lies on the other side of the visible world.
[On making dandelion achenes endearing]
Emotion is truly the key. It was essential that the 4 achenes convey their emotions in every situation. To achieve this, the first stage was meticulous screenwriting to allow them to express fear, joy, and sadness. The second phase was the animation work, with the Belgian team, orchestrated by the head animator Guionne Leroy. We worked on every minute detail that will help convey these emotions: hair-like dandelion clocks wilting, variations in leaps, the more or less lively movements of the body, etc.
I hope the audience leaves Dandelion's Odyssey with more than just the knowledge of what an achene is. That they understand that nature is not a backdrop to be trampled on, not something separate from the self. That all the little things surrounding us are the true actors in an action film. That a growing plant can be so beautiful it might make you cry. We are all a force of nature, bound to one another – together, we make up our planet.
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Seto’s team employed an intricate blend of time-lapse and ultra–slow motion macro footage shot across Japan, France, and Iceland, StackShot imaging, and robotic motion rigs with 17 cameras running simultaneously to capture miniature plant sets in studios. The result is a visually transcendent hybrid of live-action and computer-generated compositing that expands the boundaries of genre and animated storytelling.