Behind “A Circle by the River”
With Line Break Postproduction Director, Jill Zimmerman
Jill Zimmerman
We got the chance to produce a piece with artist, organizer, and storyteller Ricardo Levins Morales for the 100 percent campaign’s climate visionaries series and we’re really excited about it.
Bringing on a new postproduction specialist last year finally allowed us to be in a place where we had the expertise and capacity to do Ricardo’s illustrations justice while bringing them into the video realm. So meet Line Break Post Production Director Jill Zimmerman, and get to know the process for putting together this spectacular video.
“A Circle by the River”
100 Percent Campaign
1 : Recording Dialogue
The process started with a series of conversations with Ricardo for a piece speaking to a sustainable future and how we can get there. Ricardo wrote an original piece, and we filmed him at his studio.
Once we had the dialogue and footage of Ricardo set, we were ready to move on to start the planning process for the rest of the video.
2 : Gathering Artwork and Planning
The central visual component to this video was Ricardo’s well-known and beloved artwork, ensuring that it’s naturally pushing the narrative alongside his dialogue. This took starting off with a batch of his illustrations and piecing it together with the transcript in a shot-sheet you see below.
3 - Assembly / Editing
With Jill having a game plan set, now the animation and tedious postproduction begins. She says that a big part of working with the illustrations was taking the static piece of art and breaking it up into components that could then be animated. She achieved this through tracing each component of the image in Photoshop and created separate layers for each component traced.
1- Starting Artwork
2 - Separating components into layers
3 - finished product
Jill also had to isolate Ricardo for the illustrations to directly interact with him as he’s speaking and transitioning, and used a rotoscoping tool to achieve this
To extend parts of the art, digital paintbrushes were used, creating textures and backgrounds that fit with the original artwork
For continuity, Jill chose stars as a motif to represent people throughout the video, so whenever Ricardo mentions diaspora, movement of people, people coming together, etc. stars are incorporated into the scene
4 - Final Showing
The video was first screened at the 2022 Northern Spark event as part of a Solar Punk installation, MNISTOA 2055 that we worked on in collaboration with the 100% campaign.
In Summary & Appreciation
Ricardo has been informing our work at Line Break for a better part of a decade as an artist, organizer, and storyteller. Past collaborations we’ve done include the video series Tending the Soil: Lessons for Organizing
See and order his work directly on the RLM Studio Website