Award-winning directors work with top British singer-songwriter.
Katie Melua has released the official music video to Perfect World, directed by Karni and Saul, and taken from her latest album, In Winter.
The video represents a true masterclass in story-telling through the medium of world-class CG animation from two of the UK’s leading animators, Karni and Saul. This truly engaging and poignant short film follows a mother and her young son as they inadvertently delve into a magical wintery forest, filled with wonderment and danger.
Released on October 14th, Perfect Winterbroke into the UK Top 10 Album Chart landing Katie her seventth consecutive top 10 studio album. Katie joins Kate Bush as the only two British female artists in history to achieve this accolade. In Winter is co-produced by Katie and Adam ‘Cecil’ Bartlett, and features the 24-strong, all-female Gori Women’s Choir, who hail from the town of Gori, Georgia.
Speaking about the video’s directors, Katie says, “Karni and Saul possess an incredible gift in their ability to create substantial characters who are able to deliver emotional depth within fantastical, meticulously realised environments. They never veer away from the emotional content and fragility of the song, and that is a very rare and much appreciated quality of theirs. They genuinely care. I am so excited and grateful that they have delivered such a charming and magical movie which brings ‘Perfect World’ to life so magnificently.”
Karni and Saul, who have been working together since 2002, were nominated for a BAFTA for their short film Turning, and have won awards (including British Animation Awards) for their previous music videos. Speaking about the video for Perfect World they said:
“We love producing these kinds of unique projects. It doesn’t happen a lot in this industry that you are given the rare gift of trust from your client. The one major development that dominated the script was that the story will be built around this subject: a difficulty/challenge occurs and a perfect world situation is presented as a sort of resolution. Sometimes it’s a mother’s hug and sometimes it’s a magical slide down a frozen waterfall. This ‘tension and relief’ dynamic leads the whole piece. After the initial creative discussions with Katie we were given the opportunity to create something which is close to our heart and that we truly care about.
“Besides the opening and closing live action shots, the piece is mostly pure CG animation, and despite the incredibly tight turnaround on this we managed to do a fair amount of look development and testing, followed by very rough pencil animatics, which blocked the storyline. A CG animatics was produced while we were modelling and texturing the sets, creating the characters, testing and finalising look development. At the end…two weeks of character animation and rendering.”