Fair warning though, if you're looking for a passive movie-going experience, look elsewhere, because this movie requires you to be paying attention and using your brain at all times.
There are six intertwining storylines, each taking place in a different period of history with the same actors playing different roles (often with disregard to the usual barriers of gender or race). Each story relates to the others in ways that become more apparent as you go on, until it's clear that this is really one story with six different facets.
Each of the stories is tied together by shared themes and actors, but I also picked up on a commonality between certain objects. Some items (like the sailor's bright blue buttons) appear in several tales simply by standing the test of time until they are rediscovered by the next batch of characters. Others items are visual echoes of things that came before, like the broken china plates from 1930 and the shattered terra cotta pots that appear in the contemporary story line.
The basic concept of the image is this: I want to show Somni-451, in the same pose as the statue they worship after the fall, floating above a vast sea. There's the rubble of Seoul in the background, rising up out of the waves and snow falling from the sky. Upon closer inspection, the snowflakes are actually teeth. Somewhere in the piece will be my favorite quote from Somni-451: "From womb to tomb, our lives are not our own."I briefly considered using the line "What is an ocean but a multitude of drops?", but I like imagining that this image could be found on a religious icon after the fall, so it made more sense to stick to the other quote, which becomes a post-apocalyptic proverb after Somni's death. (That's not a spoiler. People don't live to be 300 years old.)
Originally, I'd wanted to have swirls of small objects playing around the form of Somni-451. A cloud of papers that start out as the sheet music from the Cloud Atlas Sextet and slowly change into the contents of the Swannekke Nuclear Report, as well as a mass of broken porcelain shards from the composer's story line mingling with shattered pottery from the publisher's tale. Try as I might, I couldn't get it to look good on paper though, so no clouds of earthenware for Somni.
I'd been planning on framing it as if it was an oval portrait, but after a while I decided to go with an art nouveau style design instead. It looks like that'll help me solve a lot of the design problems I'd been having. And besides, I'm such a sucker for art nouveau that I'll take any excuse to work Mucha-esque elements into an illustration.
I had to abandon the swirling object clouds, but now I have four mini-windows to work with and I can place one of each into the corners without making the main image too busy. Adding a bit of art nouveau flavor also allows me to add purely graphic elements to an otherwise realistic scene. I'd been looking for a way to include the sailor's buttons into the image and now I can work them in the background, beyond the horizon.
It's starting to come together and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.