Soul and Wisdom: The Life of Ferdowsi

Soul and Wisdom: The Life of Ferdowsi is a short animated biopic about Abol Qasem Ferdowsi Tusi, commonly abbreviated to just Ferdowsi. He was a 10th century Iranian poet that wrote the Shahnameh, a verse history detailing the Iranian kings and their champions. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature and holds a special place in the Iranian conciousness.

The Shahnameh was something I've always been passionate about. As a kid who grew up reading the Odyssey, this felt like home turf. Even my own name comes from the text!

I chose animation and motion design as my method of storytelling, because I wanted the film to have both an educational and dramatic quality. Motion Design's simple visual language had been very effective in my previous Shahnameh film, and I wanted to apply the same concepts to this project.

Overall, a team of 12 people worked on the film. I wrote, directed, narrated, and animated the project. For the illustration, I had a strong team of artists. For music, I also worked with another creator, who managed to hire local talent to perform the unique soundtrack. I kept everyone on track, especially as the project dragged into its 6th month.

Animating the project proved to be a special challenge. There were over 120 unique shots to animate, and I went back and re-animated many of them in revisions. In addition, I had to create the 3D animated segment at the beginning. I can't go over my entire process for each shot, but I decided to highlight shot 106 (seen right) as an example.

Upon closer look, some of the shots did not quite capture the feel I wanted so creative and quick solutions were neccessary. For example, I grabbed the background mountains from different unused shots and composited them together to create the high altitude feel I wanted.

I created a sun asset and corrected the whole project to give the shot a searing glow. Once I had those elements I created a plate shot and masked about the foreground elements to work on separately. For the figure of the king, I used some native effects and masks to light him. I used the masks as shadows, and used light rim to give the impression he was standing behind a giant light.

The final shot, which parrallels a scene from the Shahnameh about a king whose hubris causes him to loser favor with God, felt much less empty than it had before. I wanted the audience to feel the pride the king felt, as he thought that angels bowed to him.

Many of the shots in Soul and Wisdom were composed and composited this way. Due to our limited timeframe, it was difficult to animate complex movements in every shot. To still have dynamic visuals, we often aninmated backgrounds, using a variety of effects. This limitation also forced us to get creative with how represented Ferdowsi's life, and how we could combine the dramatic and educational.

The opening of the film is a 3D animated battle segment, which blends Ferdowsi writing the scene with the actual scene itself. Over 15+ unique assets were created for the scene, modeled from ancient Iranian artifacts and ruins. I also used Persian miniature art as a reference for some of the more stylized elements, like the tent and the castle. All of the individualyl modeled assets were compiled into a massive scene, which is where I then created the smoke effect and added the HDRI sky.

The character of Ferdowsi also proved to be a challenge. I didn't quite have time to sculpt a full 3D character, so I worked with a base model and sculpted from there. All of Ferdowsi's clothes were unqiue and needed to be sculpted and textured from scratch. This includes the famous turban that he wears. In the interest of time, having him seated as a writer helped cut down on time it would take to animate him. Making this character proved to be the most difficult element of perhaps the entire project.

Balancing the effects, models, and textures required to be constantly saving on processing power. Baking textures and models was essential. I learned how to effecvtively highlight detail in the foreground and celeverly mask lack of detail in the back. Certain very fine objects were simply 2D images arranged in a cross to give the illusion of 3D. This can be seen in the fletchings for the arrows. There were many other elements including lighting, compositing, and character animation that needed special attention.

This was my first real 3D scene and would serve as the base of learning for all my future projects. On the left you can see the final product compared to the untextured models.