Subsistence in The Dendron Sovereignty: no escape

Description

Utopia for trees? A Utopian society is only considered a utopia for that specific party because perfection is subjective. The trees only want peace, and took over because the humans were destroying the earth. When this shift commenced, some humans didn't want to comply with this higher power attempting to control them, so they revolted, which resulted in their nutrients being recycled back to help the trees thrive and grow further so they can fulfill their goals of peace within nature. We currently live in a world where superficial and artificial values reign important, leaving the natural world to suffer, so this version of the future features a system built purely on natural connection and divine perfection (from the perspective of trees specifically). The trees do not have any kind of racial bias towards other tree species, or even other natural beings, and forgive the humans that chose to change for the better, and do not punish them.

Trees communicate through shared nutrients and water to send signals to each other, and this is why the humans that are left must have the tree adaptations embedded into them so that they too can understand and communicate with their leaders, and each other without spoken language. The humans that refused to comply originally never truly understood the trees’ true intentions, which is why they remained blind with anger until their peaceful death. They were sacrificed, but it had to be done. The mutated humans who still remain don’t feel fully liberated because they are still being controlled by another entity, and humans don’t like involuntary authority. It is more like a communist society, because the trees (collectively) rule, and each member of this mutated-human-tree society live somewhat primitively in tree houses, and do everything 100% naturally, all with specific jobs that help another aspect of the community. Most of them are happy, but there will always be that one that wants to escape.

Method

After hand painting all of the assets seen in this animation, using watercolor, I then scanned them onto my computer making needed edits. Using Adobe Photoshop, I cut out each of the assets and imported them into Adobe After Effects. Here, I used keyframe animation techniques to animate the characters as if they were puppets, and animated supplemental assets accordingly.

Using audio clips from freesound.org, I mixed the audio track on Adobe Premire Pro, and makde any additional edits that were needed.