The third episode of The Bible Project‘s series How to Read the Bible came out last week, analyzing some of the overarching subgenres of biblical literature. Check it out:
From the beginning, we knew that we wanted to use three different artistic styles to represent the three categories of narrative, poetry, and discourse. But we didn’t want to leap into it haphazardly, so TBP gave me an extra week to fill up a wall will inspirational images and “visual development,” and to establish “rules” for how these different visual worlds would function. (TBP’s art director, Robert Peréz, is really into creating these “rules.)
Comics was the obvious choice for “narrative,” so I looked at a lot of old X-men and worked on standardizing a limited half-tone color palette to imitate silver- and bronze-age coloring techniques. We tried to come up with a “motion comics” sort of camera movement that would still feel pretty dynamic.
For “Poetry,” I suggested drawing inspiration from the Post-Impressionists, whose vidid, even lurid, sense of color was more concerned with jolting the viewer out of his stupor than with representing reality faithfully. I was mainly inspired by André Derain and early Matisse. Though I did the vizdev for these scenes, in the actual video they were all painted by my collaborator Nyssa Oru, who is absolutely killing it with some of these paintings. Seriously, check her out.
For “Discourse,” which is such an abstract style of writing, I turned to early 20th-century abstract art–mainly cubism, dada, futurism, and some surrealism. I looked at a lot of Kandinsky and Paul Klee, as well as ol’ Picasso. PMurphy animated the discourse scenes with an impish technique that mimicked stop-motion animation. These sequences were the most fun to storyboard.
As if all that stuff weren’t complicated enough, there’s also a bunch of frame-by-frame animation of a woman walking through a book store. I only started attempting frame-by-frame animation in 2017, and the more I do, the more dissatisfied I am with the results…as I hold myself to a higher and higher standard! It also gives me such tremendous respect for the artists who can do it well. The one thing I’ll say in my defense is that these videos come out frequently and I have to move very, very fast!
Episode 4 (coming out in early August) won’t be quite as elaborate, but we’re still working on some really cool stuff for it.