mewithoutYou: The King Beetle

Poster for an animated "music video" I'm making for mewithoutYou's song, The King Beetle on a Coconut Estate. I finished the animatics in July, but I've been working on other things since then, and it will take a long time to finish; let me know if you want me to drop you a link when it's done.

The cast includes various species of beetles and other animals, but the beetle I chose for the royal family is the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetle (Oryctes rhinoceros). The location is an amalgamation of Pacific island locations; my father is Filipino, and I've seen coconut plantations there.

I'm a lifelong admirer of Eric Carle's painted tissue paper collages (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.), and I'm aiming to digitally create something similar but darker in this film.

I couldn't figure out how to arrange everything in a triangle in this vertical format, so I tried to suggest a diamond by mirroring the beetle/stem against the fire/smoke/mountain.

The title was drawn with pencil using the "Animilia" style which I first used in [link] ; it's meant to look somewhat insectine.

And yes, that is what a rhododendron stem looks like.