Inspired by Follower of Dieric Bouts the Elder, Christ Crowned with Thorns, 1475.

We wanted to emphasize the suffering that Jesus Christ went through, and also make a transition from pain to joy. Usually people see depictions of Christ always completely painful with the attention being on his death on the cross, for example in the passion of Christ there was more focus on Jesus’ character being nailed and tortured to death. In our animation, we wanted to leave the audience with the sense of relief. We know that paintings of this subject were often related to illustrations of the weeping Virgin Mary and so the artist could be thinking of the whole story of the Passion whilst painting an image that relates only to the beginning of it. Our artist was known for depicting the whole Easter story, and other examples of his work can be seen in the National Gallery, London.

The project was simple. We wanted to tell the story of the emotion of Jesus Christ during his death on the cross. To do this we decided to animate his eyes with drops of blood, staining his cheeks, and his bleeding head from the thorns. We used the rostrum camera to make the movement of his tears. In the background we used after effects and final cut pro to make the background shift from texture to a glowing halo to highlight and emphasize the mood.