“Where do your dreams take you?”

This question drove our approach to Sun Siyam’s brand film. Not just as a tagline, but as a technical challenge: how do you animate the boundary between reality and dreams?

⚡ Chasing Dreams

How do you capture the ethereal quality of a dream? That was our challenge when Sun Siyam Resorts approached us to create their brand film. The answer lay in the technology we had developed for Paradise Lost - our experimental short that explored the boundaries between frame-by-frame and vector animation.

🎯 The Innovation

We built upon Paradise Lost’s pipeline, pushing it further to handle the dreamlike transitions Sun Siyam required. The key was in the handoffs - each scene flowing into the next like memories bleeding together.

This consisted of a lot of FX work. Most of the FX work we’ve done wasn’t as ambitious, to achieve it, we vastly expanded our capabilities; in terms of efficiency in authoring and rendering(we switched to a proxy system) as well as the breadth of FXs we were unconsciously not using in fear of render times.

So, the true innovation is really in circumventing hardware limitations to achieve a specific shot quality rather than letting limitations determine what shot is possible.

⚙️ The Machine

The 45-second piece demanded precision across 16 scenes and 22 shots. We structured it as a series of match cuts, using our heist-style pipeline:

1. Storyboard locks in week one, establishing visual anchors
2. Key frame artists commit to transition points
3. Vector and frame-by-frame teams work in parallel
4. Sound design weaves the reality-dream boundary

🔥 Why It Works

Traditional resort films focus on amenities. We focused on moments - the parasail wing eclipsing the sun, condensation rolling down a glass, oil drops in a spa treatment. Each transition is both technically precise and emotionally resonant.

🚀 The Edge

• Capturing moments
• Parallel production tracks
• Sound design as narrative device - thematically

The constraints of our pipeline - particularly the “no revisions” rule - forced us to nail the dreamy-yet-precise feeling in the first pass. Every frame had to serve both the technical transition and the emotional story. It didn’t happen that way. We iterated quite a few times until we came upon the final quality we were looking for.

This was really where we realized, the pipeline needs to be able to handle revisions. The edge came in the form of being able to effectively integrate proxy in the workflow. There is a strength in repetition.

✨ Impact

The resulting piece serves as both brand film and technical milestone. It proves that our Paradise Lost innovations can scale to client work without losing their experimental edge. More importantly, it shows how technical constraints, when embraced fully, enable rather than limit creative expression.

🎨 The Team

• 🎬 Direction & Edit: Duval Weerakoone
• 🎨 Storyboard and Animation: Ashwitha De Mel
• ✨ Color: Ravindu Sachinda
• 🎵 Sound: Shamika Makalanda
• Line Manager: Liswith Obinamuni

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