Chiesi - What I See

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Through a first-person narrative we try to raise awareness about a rare disease, called Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency (LSCD)

Client: Chiesi Farmaceutici
Produced by Fabio Abatantuono

Directed by Riccardo Bottoni, Simone Pace
Story by Francesco Giliberto, Tiziana Zimbili
Written by Francesco Giliberto, Riccardo Bottoni, Simone Pace

Illustration: Silvia Marchetti
Animation: Riccardo Bottoni (all the scenes, 3D), Silvia Marchetti (textures, eye rig)

Music theme: Francesco Rabaglia
Sound design and mix: Francesco Rabaglia (Big pine creek Recording Studio)
Voice: David Callahan
Translation: Zosia Krasodomska-Jones
Special thanks to: un_type, Litoexpress, Chiara Fucà

For the animation, every scene was initially a vectorial illustration. They were then animated and texturized.
Textures were made in Photoshop.

The more complex scene, the city at night, was built in this way: firstly I drew the vector illustration of the city and the textures. Then Riccardo Bottoni rebuilt the city in 3D following the styleframe and animated the camera, cars and people. Lastly he applied the textures to the 3D scene.

The characters that you can see walking in the street were all modeled on the base of this sketches:

For this project the storyboard was made directly with vector drawings. Initially we wanted to give a "trippy" and almost scary effect to the scenes with the main character point of view (to convey the feeling of panic that a person with sight problems and pain may feel in common situations). So we tried different color palettes in combination with simplified and distorted shapes.

This is the final palette. Some elements from the storyboard changed while working on styleframes:

The most challenging part of the project before animation was to decide how to represent the disease and compromised sight. Symptomps of Limbal Stem Cell Deficiency include eye pain, blurry vision and a white layer of tissue over the cornea, which is not transparent as it should be. We tried different solutions to to show the reflection of the real world inside the eye, and the effect of the disease on the view, avoiding actual blurriness.