The Red Shoes is a fairy tale written by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen. It was first published in 1845, then adapted into films, ballet, novels, songs and video games.

The goal for this project was to create a set of style frames for the title sequence of a hypothetical film based on the fairy tale.

An orphaned peasant girl is adopted by a rich elderly lady. Her adoptive mother dotes on her and buys her a pair of red shoes. She loves these shoes so much that she wears them everywhere, even to church, having grown spoiled and disrespectful. Because of this, her shoes are cursed to force her to dance forever, causing her great pain, and even to miss her adoptive mother’s funeral. As penance, she has an executioner chop off her feet, and spends the rest of her days cleaning and scrubbing the halls of the Church. She finally finds peace when an angel appears to her and leads her to heaven.

The objectives of this project were to set up the creepy and mysterious mood, to show the credits, to provide some implicit hints about the story line and to attract the audience to keep on watching.

I also considered this project as a chance to practice creating style frames with Cinema 4D.

A red ribbon was used to represent Karen, the protagonist. The camera followed the red ribbon as it flew. The ribbon flew pass a thorn bush which indicated that Karen danced through thorn bushes. An angel tore the ribbon into two parts which indicated Karen was not forgiven by the angel and later her feet were chopped off.  The red ribbon then fell towards a pair of blurred red shoes at the end of the title sequence which transitioned into the beginning of the film.