Media
Adobe Animate, After Effects, Procreate, Premiere

Description

The character goes to get his mail and re-parks his car in a different spot, and it is struck by lightning. The meaning of this piece is an expression of some of my religious views. I know this probably doesn't come across as having an actual opinionated message about religion very easily but I intended it to be that way. I didn't want this piece to come across as a heavy-handed statement (no pun intended) about my beliefs to those I don't know well who would be seeing this piece because I don't usually feel comfortable fully sharing religious or political views with those I am not very close with. I am an open-theist which means that I believe that although I do subscribe to religion and believe in God I don't believe that there is much of a fate in general for anything that happens. I believe that even God doesn't know the exact future. If this wasn't the case that would mean everything is ultimately predetermined.

Skeptics and Religious people alike frequently ask the very valid question "How could God be righteous and allow horrible things to happen?" Terrible, completely undeserved things happen to people everyday for absolutely no reason and I believe that very frequently things are simply determined by chance. When certain horrible things happen out of the blue I think that at times even God has no true foresight of them because the future simply doesn't exist yet. This piece shows an example of this because a man parks his car in a different spot to have it damaged by being struck by lightning, something that he couldn't have caused or influenced, and something so instantaneous I'd argue God cannot foresee and warn him about. The person is lacking a lot of physical features to serve as a blank slate representing people in general. The giant hand coming down and rolling the die represents God not knowing what would happen in this case, either (although maybe he at least has a knowledge of probabilities of things happening we don't).

I used Procreate to rough out the cel animation I did for this piece and draw assets. I used Adobe Animate to color the cel animation, and After Effects for most of it such as the rain, car, shading, and lighting. Premiere was used for the sound design. Credit to the artist Flying Lotus for the song "Zodiac Shit" by him I used.

Process Photos