Floating and dancing in the “Garden of Earthly Delights”

Two video screens and a range of technical tricks were needed to transform Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights” into a stage production. “Bosch Dreams” by Canadian company Les 7 Doigts de la Main (The 7 fingers on a hand) presents live acrobatics artfully integrated into an animated film. The circus artists’ fantastic, floating figures literally bring the painting to life.

How do you integrate live acrobatics into an animated film, all set in a fantastic, surreal world? How do you make figures float back and forth between the stage and the screen, like pizzaiolos on the peak shift? The answer is: a synchronously split and coordinated video animation, divided on to two screens, with the acrobats between them. It might sound simple, but it required a lot of technical finesse as well as imagination to create “Bosch Dreams”. The multimedia production is the accomplishment of Montreal-based company 7 Doigts de la Main and Parisian illustrator Ange Potier. While the Canadian circus artists put gravity to the test in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”, floating through the air with a lightness that surpasses even Bosch’s vision, Potier introduces Jim Morrison and the surrealism of Salvador Dalí to their trippy, psychedelically animated world.

BTR asked Ange Potier, a creator of comics, animated films, video games and scenographies, now based in Buenos Aires, how he made his animations: “All the images are taken from Bosch’s paintings. I didn’t draw anything myself, only copied and articulated the bodies of the people and animals portrayed. To make the landscapes, I used Photoshop to multiply details, e.g. of the ground and foliage, and allow more lengthy panning in the film.” The original triptych by Bosch is on display in the Prado in Madrid. Potier photographed it in detail for “Bosch Dreams”. To animate the images, he used the Adobe program After Effects. “It’s really intended for compositing and special effects and not for character animation but still includes some useful functions.” Then it was a matter of introducing a human perspective, as “Bosch painted the scene as if observing it from above, from God’s perspective. The trees barely hide anything, and even things in the distance appear very close. But for our scenography, we go down to the level of the plants.” In combination with the two projection levels, this creates a 3D effect.