Last summer I was able to attend the Realm Makers virtual conference, where author ND Wilson was the opening keynote speaker. His perspective on the fantasy genre and the Christian author’s role was game-changing to me, and it really left me with a new perspective on God’s creation and fantastic storytelling throughout history. Wilson believes that we live in “God’s fantasy novel,” in that, God’s creation and history is fantastic, and is the origin for all fantasy fiction (Marvel comics inspired by the Book of Judges, for example). In the original keynote, Wilson echoed some of JRR Tolkien’s and CS Lewis’s beliefs on the fantasy genre, and charged his audience to live in God’s novel as a character they would want to read about.
Since a lot of his points stuck with me and other conference attendees, I wanted to adapt his talk into a short video that explained his view on fantasy, informing them of a new and unique way to see God and storytelling.
Here’s some interesting facts and Easter eggs I hid in the video:
– I built each scene in Photoshop and After Effects, sometimes compositing several images into one (such as the first scene).
– The Moses and Sampson scenes were originally still images from Pixabay, but I was able to break them into layers and animate individual pieces.
– The newspaper scene is a fun read. The small type is my entire script for this video, copied and pasted several times (this can also be seen in the newspaper texture over the next few page flips and the Tolkien scene. The main headline under the author photo is a nod to the original keynote event, the paper is issue 2020, September 24 is the project’s due date, and “Definitely Not Fake News” is the newspaper’s tagline.
– Both ND Wilson’s author photo and Tolkien’s is a complex layer stack in Photoshop that makes a normal photograph (colored or monochromatic) look like a suuuuuper awesome pencil or ink sketch, and I am in LOVE with the effect.
– Tolkien’s thoughts on “sub-creating” can be found in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (Wiki cliff notes if you’re interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Fairy-Stories (Links to an external site.))
– If you look closely, the class essay is written by a “Clive Lewis,” AKA CS Lewis. The “S” doodle in the bottom corner is a nod to my elementary school days where everyyyonneee drew the “S” in their margins.
2 Comments on “Magic of the Real Kinetic Type Video”
Oh, Jenneth, this was FANTASTIC!!! I, too, was absolutely blown away by N.D. Wilson’s keynote. It kind of changed my life and perspective on…everything. I LOVE how you summarized it here, and created such a gorgeous video! I loved every bit of this! <3
*Squeeeeee* I totally agree—definitely changed my life. My new mantra is “Be the character you’d want to read about” and it really helps you out your life into perspective. Thanks so much for your super nice words too!!!!