HEAVEN is an independent project I realized right after a commercial work for the Seoul Biennale 2021. This time, I was very much into experiments with watercolor and very thin paint formulas in oder to recreate night skies and night blues. The client requested an airy and hovering appearance of visuals as a background for a 360 projection in the museum. HEAVEN directly emerged from this approach and I ran artistic research to implement more properties of sky and air like clouds, wind and nebula. I narrowed the color spectrum down significantly to maintain the visual identity of the sky and worked out details with a focus on luminance. Layering fluids in order to create dimension is a very fiddly and fragile task. Many very long runs are needed as structures take time to unfold and drift. The lesson I learned (once again): You need to get a feeling of when a simple composite of water and paint might become a scene or not. If all practical elements as well as light, exposure, contrast and sharpness match, pull the trigger and shoot for at least 15 minutes. Don’t ever touch the composition as is moves so slowly that you can’t guess motion in realtime anyway. Get your shot, bring it into your edit and see if framing, motion and anything else do work as a scene or not. The whole process leads to excessive shooting times and a huge consumption of supplies which makes this visual method more expensive than others. However, I hope the results speak for themselves and you can enjoy HEAVEN as much I did during the creation.

 

All scenes were created with watercolor, ink and acrylic paint. Shot with an 8K cinema camera.

Available for commercial licensing in 8K SDR and HDR.