Daily Front Row

2008 January 24

Miuccia Prada's Trembled Blossoms

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An image of the Prada spring women's ad campaign
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(NEW YORK) Miuccia Prada is set to unveil a new project at the Prada Broadway Epicenter at a private screening on February 5 during New York’s Fashion Week.

The original animated four-minute short, entitled Trembled Blossoms, is the final feature of a body of work that began last summer in conjunction with the design of the women’s Spring 2008 collection that debuted in Milan in September, based on inked drawings (used as wallpaper designs) which depict a lush, slightly scandalous, landscape of flowers and nymphs that evokes Prada’s vision, blending suggestions of Art Nouveau, Liberty, Aubrey Beardsley, and Hieronymus Bosch.

For the past seven years, Prada has commissioned temporary, architecture-specific wallpapers, environments, short animations, and interactive media for the Prada Epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills, and Tokyo in collaboration with AMO, architect Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based think tank; 2x4, a design studio in New York; as well as other noted designers, artists, and programmers. A selection of wallpapers from the collaboration between Prada and 2x4 is currently on display at the Architecture and Design gallery at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

For the most recent iteration of the on-going project in New York and Beverly Hills, Prada conceived of a fantastical landscape that could work both as an environment and fabric concept. Working over the summer in collaboration with Michael Rock and Sung Kim of 2x4, scores of treatments were developed and put aside. 2x4 introduced James Jean, a young illustrator from Los Angeles, to the project, and together they produced the prototypical designs for the Epicenters, the show space, and the special fabrics.

Trembled Blossoms is the extension of the project into the film medium. The animated short based on the wallpaper designs is directed by James Lima, produced by Hi! Production, Max Brun, with animation by Sight Effects, L.A. The goal was to create a classic animated film, from Hollywood’s golden era of the 1930s and 1940s, while employing modern animation and motion capture technology.

While the technology is advanced, the concept is essentially the same as classic animation in which artists drew over filmed footage of an actress dancing to create Snow White. For Trembled Blossoms, the motions of a dancer playing the nymph, outfitted with small tracking reflectors, are captured and recorded, then digitally superimposed onto the drawings.