The Sleeping Beauty

CGI and animation specialist studio Steelworks has released a gorgeous CG film for NYC Ballet, promoting its production of ‘The Sleeping Beauty’.

Following the central motif of a delicate pink rose, the film is a visual delight, featuring stunning fabric and particle simulations, floating gold dust, flowing floral elements, and fluttering silk-like butterfly wings. Just like ballet dancers, each piece of the medley moves in perfect harmony with the ethereal score, luring viewers into a captivating new world.

To craft the beautiful film, Steelworks was tasked with briefly and abstractly interpreting a selection of key scenes from ‘The Sleeping Beauty’, inspired by its exquisite scenery and costume design. With only 30 seconds to work with, the team proposed a full CGI piece utilising motifs from the ballet to capture the emotion as well as the main storytelling points.

Steelworks drew aesthetic inspiration from the ballet’s lush stage design, curating a colour palette of warm pinks, lilacs, yellows, and orange-golds. In particular, the team wanted to reflect two of the production’s most iconic floral sequences: the ‘Rose Adagio’ and the ‘Garland Dance’. The former sees each of Princess Aurora’s suitors approach her with a rose and perform a dance, while the latter is set to some of the ballet’s most identifiable music, and features garland motifs and kaleidoscopic patterns - an influence clearly visible in Steelworks’ film.

Ensuring a seamless medley of elements, Steelworks and the client developed animatic motion reviews until they were approved at medium resolution, before sending this to a composer to prepare a bespoke matching score. Meanwhile, Steelworks rendered out the final resolution delivery, and merged the visuals with the sound design once it was ready. The end result is a faultless blend of animation, colour, motion, and sound, evoking a visceral emotional response in the viewer.