Finland’s first motion comic series, Divine Consultants – The Beginning is launched on Yle and Instagram.
Divine Consultants – The Beginning finds a 16-year-old Joy who lives in a divided world, where everyone has to choose their side and powerful Zeniths discriminate against the minority, Nadir.
The Nadir are rumoured to spread a dangerous disease that only infects the Zenith. Frustrated Joy tries to merge into the mainstream by any means, but when her friend Hope disappears mysteriously, she has enough. Joy explores the mutation of a strange society by transforming herself into a film noir detective, but does her alter ego comes in her way.
The visual style of the series is a new take on the motion comic and the speciality of it is like an expressive animated graphic novel art, mixed with traditional character animation, parallax scenes and transitions. The inventive style speaks to both friends of graphic novels and animation.
The first six episodes can be presently viewed at Yle Areena. More episodes are slated for October 2019 and early 2020. The series can also be followed by the #divineconsultants on the Areena’s Instagram account where the first 18 episodes are now being published one per day. The Instagram format in total is 54×1’.
The motion comic series has been developed for teenagers and young adults, a target group that currently only a few broadcasters produce meaningful and engaging content for. Fiilin Good Films’ producer Juha Fiilin is opening international sales for the series.
The web series is to be followed by a fully animated tv series, also in co-production with Yle. Fiilin is excited about the challenge of transforming the graphic novel style illustration to a more traditional animation format (13×11’).
The international team behind the series is Finnish-Irish-British. Martha Mackintosh (Game of Thrones Video Game) plays the lead role. The series is directed & produced by Juha Fiilin, written by Adam Cullen and the lead artist is Jan Andersson.