MALTA OSKURA

The brief for this project was to create an animated opening for Heritage Malta’s series called Malta Oskura. Heritage Malta wanted to go towards a new direction with this show and focused on the dark historical events that happened in Malta. Furthermore, they also wanted a new approach to the opening and part of the brief was to create an animated sequence that evoked the show’s spirit. I was involved in created the script, the storyboards, the animation and the editing process alongside my colleague who worked on creating the assets.

The first thing that I did was to research themes about the subject with Heritage Malta. I had a couple of keywords that influenced the overall direction for this project, these were; death, light and shadow, historical locations, epic, dramatic and hope. Shortly after creating a moodboard, I started looking for some music as inspiration to write the script. After a couple of revisions with Heritage Malta, I developed the first draft for the storyboards. The vision for the final look is to have ink reveal effects that transition from one visual to the next. Moreover everything appears as though it were drawn on canvas.

I wanted the music to lead the entire animation. This particular track, Adventure in Dune by Roman P. starts off gradual but builds up towards a really dramatic climax that I think fits well with the themes for Malta Oskura. This storyboard below was a direct result of that inspiration.

The animatic allowed me to present the work to Heritage Malta as a proof of concept as well as guide me later on in developing the actual final sequences (creating the assets etc).

Although some cuts were made from the original drafts, there were also some new additions. Moreover in this final version, I developed the canvas texture look that the visuals would be overlaid on. We initially had some issues with the overall style of the visuals but after some messing around in After Effects and Photoshop, we were able to adapt and deliver a pleasing aesthetic. For the title I went with the font Aperto Semibold and I added a glow and paper texture to end result for a more worn out effect.