I wanted to test whether I could make an engaging motion reel for Turku City Theatre's musical Seili, by Satu Rasila, Mikko Kouki and Jussi Vahvaselkä. Set in 1910s Turku, the play follows women committed to the psychiatric hospital on Seili, a small island in the Archipelago Sea that held a leper hospital from 1619 and a mental hospital until 1962. The reel and poster are my own proposal, made without a commission from the theatre.
When you strip a map of Seili down to its outline and elevation contours and mirror it side by side like an inkblot test, the two islands form the halves of a human brain. I pressed that relief into a dark sheet and grew cream tendrils out from both coastlines like firing neuron synapses, framing the women in the stage photo.
Each half carries its own text along the shoreline. On the left are the era's diagnoses: mania, melankolia and hysteria. On the right is the line from the theatre's page: älä unohda minua, don't forget me. In the loop, the stage photo opens dim and out of focus, and the light and focus pull to the women as the tendrils grow down around them. Once every branch has landed, a pulse runs from root to tip and lights SEILI, set in PF Marlet Display Thin Italic.
I animated the scene with AI-driven Cavalry, paired with a Python script that draws the thirty tendrils frame by frame. Early tests in Blender and After Effects looked rubbery or blurred, and a hand-drawn boil test jittered too fast. Giving each tendril its own schedule solved it: swells open into hollow cream tubes with dark slits inside and settle out of step with the opposite hemisphere, while Cavalry drives the synced light pulses, path type and focus pull.
The reel runs in three recomposed formats: 4:5 for the feed, 9:16 for Reels and 16:9 for wide screens. For the landscape version I extended the stage on both sides of the photograph with Photoshop's Generative Expand so the actresses stay framed to the hips.