‘Divine Consultants – The Beginning’, an animated story taking place in a dystopian sci-fi world, has been launched at YLE Areena. It depicts a battle between the good and the evil with absurd humor and social satire.
“Our young heroes fight for the world peace and freedom of souls in this cross-genre animated series,” tells the Finnish creator and director Juha Fiilin.
“I wanted to create meaningful and diverse content for the youth.
Divine Consultants is not only an adventure comedy, but a growth story in a corrupt and divided world.”
Strong graphic novel style with animated details are in key role in the visual storytelling of the series. The overall transmedia aspect commences in the web series and continues later in a fully serialized TV series and a video game.
Divine Consultants is a Finnish-Irish co-production but its creator and director Juha Fiilin shares his time between Helsinki, London and Barcelona. Script writer Adam Cullen comes from Ireland and many voice artists from London abling the strong British accent in a story.
The Finnish team includes the lead artist Jan Andersson, who is known for comics, music videos and a collaboration with the author Katja Kettu among others. In a short animation Handkerchiefs for Sale (2003), he was already experimenting with comic style by making bubbles in 2D and characters and background as stop motion. Sound designer Salla Hämäläinen has a background in Rovio and many awarded animated shorts. Her job is to create a rich soundscape and to fine-tune the mood of each scene with the director. The dialogue for the web series is made in English but the Finnish version has text boxes and speech bubbles in Finnish.
The pilot version of Divine Consultants has been chosen to 40 different international film festivals gaining so far 10 awards and 8 nominations for a winner. Intern
ational sales for Divine Consultants will take place in Cannes Film Festival btw 15th and 18th of May and and in other international markets during the year.
LV