introduction
Inspired by the recent news of the next Avatar series project I wanted to conceptualize and create a teaser campaign for Avatar: Seven Havens. This project explores ideas through a minimalist and abstract visual approach. The plot of the series is about twins that will be the main characters of the show, one being the avatar and how the avatar is viewed differently after previous world events.
brief
Since there is not a lot of information about the series released yet, the objective was to imagine what the key art could potentially look like by exploring symbolic storytelling and worldbuilding in design. The challenge is to create something within the franchise, but being its own standalone series without using characters or trying to say too much. The direction is to center the theme around the element earth, a minimal approach and abstract ideas such as balance, duality and connection.
research
I looked through past key art that was made by the Avatar franchise and seeing the details and themes that went into the art. While most of the art is character focused, I wanted to take elements or inspiration from them such as the typography art used in Korra or the decorative graphics.
typeface/color
I tried out different kinds of typefaces including some that would fit the culture of the show. Since Avatar is heavily asian inspired or using brush strokes or hand scripted in a way. In terms of color, since the next series is going to be focused on Earth, I used earth tones and colors such as greens and yellows and playing around with saturation to get the feel.
Concept development
Some ideas I explored when creating these draft posters were, what if the nations all looked like one instead of the four divided? It could give the idea that the four nations are now seven and therefore none of them have a color respective to their nation. I tried playing around with duality, since the series will be focused on twin characters starting on opposition, it made sense to think of that kind of connection. I played with silhouettes as well since we don’t know what any of the characters looked like. In terms of what we were given thinking about the wording shattering and cataclysm it did make me think of earthquakes and cracks so there were imagery that I played with that as well. I did lean more towards the idea of duality and trying to emulate the idea of ying and yang to represent the characters and that’s where I started drawing symbols. I also tried to play around with placement and lines to see how I can connect to symbols or motifs. I played around with the weight of these symbols since I knew that in the series earth has always been portrayed as something bold and heavy.
Concept development 2
I liked how the symbols turned out and I wanted to lean more into the ideas to represent the key art and tried to see how that would look as a final key art poster. I also explored ideas where I layered multiple concepts together to see how it would look. The final key art poster I decided on was layering multiple concepts to help the world building. Showing a cracked map representing a world that is imbalance, and on top of that is the symbol to reunite and bring balance, which are the twins woven together by fate.
ANIMATION DRAFTING
When working on the animation I had a rough idea of what I wanted to create. I wanted to do a story that recaps major events in the past series that many people remember and incorporate something new from the key art in the poster I created. In the first scene it would be the fire nation taking over everything and the glow symbolizing Aang stopping the war. I played around with overlays and noise effects to get this color change effect. For the next scene I wanted to do the scene where Korra opened the spirit portal, which is represented by this pillar of light. For that I just used glow effects on a solid object and expanded it and playing around with some specific light effects to get the light to pop out in a certain way. For the last scene I chose to have these two lights represent the next characters of the series as I did in the previous scenes with the little sparkle lights. I added a wiggle effect to give the lights a way to move around and directed them to a specific position so I could transition them into the yellow graphic logo I made. In between the scenes I did a simple fade in with text to explain the story.
MOCK UPS
MOCK UPS
For the mock ups besides making posters to place everywhere I wanted to incorporate the element of Earth since the focus of the chapter will be around Earth. The Earth is everywhere and when I think of Earth I mean like the sidewalks, the concrete walls, and out in nature. I thought it would be cool to hint this teaser campaign spray painting the symbol across all sorts of places to show the coming of the new series.
I created a teaser animation in a instagram story format. This story recaps quickly the past series and shows what may come and the key art.