DOUNIA B.

Visual Direction & Animation

Het Paleis, MarthaTentatief and Bart Van Nuffelen worked with me on their second instalment of their theater piece Dinska Bronska. Building on what was done before we set out to make a dialogue between an animation and an actor that tells a riveting story of a modern day heroine.

Client:
HetPaleis
Marthatentatief
Bart Van Nuffelen

Collaborators:
Animation/Visual director: Remy Ndow
Animation: Tom Metdepenningen
Additional animation: Robin Martens (Klokkenhuis)
Coloring: Dennis Goudket
Compositing: Remy Ndow

Why the hell does she have to make a presentation about her day?

A day in Dounia’s life is not like others, but if her teacher insists she will give him more than what he bargained for.

Dounia B. is a stubborn teenager that tells us about her life, her many responsibilities as big sister, her relationship with her dad and a big loss she doesn’t like to talk about.

Throughout the play the drawing gets rougher as Dounia reveals more about her reality.

We use shadows many times in our play, to put Dounia into the world she is talking about.

These shadows blur the lines between reality and magic

During the play our actress behind the screen grounds the shadow in reality. So when we replace her with an animated shadow the audience believes everything that happens is real.

Dancing is a very important part of Dounia's life.

We worked together with dances for the choreography on the scene and on the screen.

Making the animation

To bring these illustrations to life we used cel animation, a time-consuming animation style where you draw every frame by hand. This really made everything look like real kids drawings.