Director Rashad Haughton has released a teaser trailer for his upcoming animated short film titled ‘Love Like Aliens’. Based on the artwork of iconic Japanese designer Sorayama Hajime, who is known for his precisely airbrushed erotic pin-ups of women and feminine robots, Haughton and media start-up Wonderstanding are combining visually stunning CGI based on Hajime’s work with music to create what the director is calling a “sonic” film.
To explain himself a bit, Haughton says this:
“In the silent film era, images were created first with music performed at the screenings and in the music video era, music was created first. What we’ve done with sonic film and ‘Love Like Aliens’ is a symbiotic creative process between the audio and visual.”
According to the press release found on Twitch, the film’s “sonic” component is the title track of the movie, which is performed by Haughton’s musical project Rad-6, a collective of producers and artists.
In creating the film, Haughton moved to Tokyo to work with top CGI group Shirogumi, Studio 4C’s Tatsuyuki Tanaka, and Tomo Ishioka. The director also opted to shoot many of the live action sequences with actors rather than use motion capture technology. Later, after “painstaking storyboarding for the more elaborate set pieces, he directed the CG animators to capture the most emotional scenes and subtle human movement ‘by eye’.”
Check out the teaser for ‘Love Like Robots’ below.
Director Rashad Haughton has definitely created something interesting here. From the description in the press release, it sounds to me like a futuristic, highly Japanese-influenced version of Disney’s ‘Fantasia’ minus the classical music. Judging from the trailer, I can definitely say that ‘Love Like Aliens’ will at least look really cool. We shall see how the finished product turns out once it’s released.
