Library of Babel, 2018
For this project, we are supposed to complete a 24 pages booklet for the extraordinary short story ‘Library of Babel‘ by Jorge Luis Borges.
First of all, to be honest, it was a challenge for a non-native speaker like me to fully interpret the hidden meaning inside this story. Therefore instead of strictly follow the description of the story, I tried to utilize my own impressions for this story and generate my own illustrations.
My first impression for this story was ‘Pious’. Although the author depicted those imaginary even impossible scenes of a LIBRARY, I still sensed the atmosphere of religious. And my first direction went for hand-drawing illustrations. As this method could be easily combined with the ancient codex, which could be used to convey creeds or dogmas.
However, I tried a totally opposite method for my second direction. There were lots or paradoxical scenes through these stories which could be normally considered to be impossible to present, why couldn’t I try to bring those confrontational content into the 3D world? I knew this could be rather hard but I believe it worth a try.
I picked some paragraphs from which I could get resonance and distilled some keywords from these paragraphs. For instance, hexagon, infinite, and chaos. I combined those keywords with some metaphors from the story and created these 3D illustrations.
The process was hard to describe, imagining some paradoxical scenes and representing them was full of challenges but also thrilling to conquer those obstacles. My workflow was my expectation or anticipation came first, and I would try multiple methods to make them real.
For example, there was a paragraph talked about infinite ‘MCV‘, I picked the tiny little hexagon columns as the basic element and learned to use the SCATTER tool from Octane render to duplicate them in a large scale. What I wanted to convey through this illustration was the feeling of infinite repetition and relentless growth.
Under these principles, I completed my very first publication which contains 3D illustrations. It was exciting! :)
The compatible video was rendered by C4D too, and I basically followed the principle from the booklet itself while creating the video. My purpose was interpreting the scenes of the story in a different way, and presenting those virtual languages in a 'tangible' way.
Music Credit:
S.T.A.Y / Hans Zimmer / Interstellar
By the way here’s the original story:
Library of Babel / Jorge Luis Borges