Final Animation

Here I will explain some of the processes involved in actually making my final animation, followed by the animation itself at the end of the post. Firstly I will say that the prep work is not included in this post and it is more about the progression of render tests and animation choices, to see how the environments were made simply look further back in the blog. The biggest challenge for creating the animation was making it flow in the way I wanted, which was for the eye to lead straight to the canyon, which lead to the clouds, which lead to the ice planet, and so on.

There are two problems with this, the first is that the files ended up quite large and hard to manage, the second is the render times are completely ridiculous. To deal with the first problem animation files were kept seperate except for the canyon to ice cave scene which had to be part of the same animation to blend correctly. To deal with the second problem rather than rendering the animations out to AVI files they were rendered as PNG sequences, this allowed for faster render times with no consequence if the computer turned itself off or something like that, it can also useful for compositing to have stills of the first and last frame of each animation.

Because the canyon and ice cave scene were both seperate I had to merge the files, I then set up a new camera, and started re-arranging all the keyframes that were already in each scene. I then thought about the feedback I had recieved in focus groups and started creating test renders. Here is the first below.

In this render I had simply put the pieces together, and roughly created the transition between environments, the cubes were for cloud placement because at this point I hadn't merged them with that file. I also tested the changing of the background colour in order to try an change the mood of the scene but this only really became effective at changing the mood when the colour of the lights were also changed along with the sky. The shattering of the sky although it wasn't what I had originally envisioned was the best way I could think of that would also represent that world shattering after the mountain is broken. The main problem with this scene was the brightness, altough it doesn't have ambient occlusion on but the ice planet was meant to get much darker as the camera approaches.

In the above scene the main changes are the clouds were added and the lights and materials of some objects has much smoother animation that was much closer to what I had envisioned. The clouds turning dark before they explode was interesting because it was actually just the way the material was picking up the area light from the canyon but I quite liked it so left it in. The clouds are supposed to become less interesting and then dissipate so them turning a greyer darker colour does make them seem less appealing and then they explode. If I had time I would have liked to make the whole cloud scene longer maybe have the camera fly through clouds for about 20 seconds, but unfortuneately I didn't have the best time management nearing the end and was only able to render what I felt was a priority, including re-renders of all the other scenes.

Below is the final Animation although I will be working on a longer version in order to create a music video but hopefully the piece demonstrates how light, colour, movement and form all communicate emotion in experimental animation. Although the piece has undergone many changes, and the project as a whole was a fairly bumpy road, I am happy with the final piece, as stupid as it sounds I feel that it is one of the purest things I have ever created and is very close to what I had envisioned. If I had more time I would have liked to add more synaesthesic elements that would visualise the music, I would have also liked for some of the scenes longer, but as it stands I think the amount of time it takes is well suited for the degree show as people won't want to stand in the one place for five minutes watching my animation.

Quick Look at some other experimental animations

Erään hyönteisen tuho (The Death of an Insect)

First thoughts: The most striking quality about this short film is the movement, although the detail in the models and the huge variation of lighting adds greatly to the piece but the movement is what creates this sort of pure beauty from what many people would consider to be disgusting things, the film seems to relate the insects and their movements to aspects of human life, to begin with it seemed like despair, falling and things falling apart, it then started to turn to destruction and as soon as the light to dark horizon shows up and the sun moves rapidly to the right the insects begin marching and almost look like they have guns. By the end of the film the insects are incorporated with our real world and have created complex ethereal machines that float above our cities.

The overarching theme seems to be humanities disrespect for all forms of life and our preference to destroy rather than create, much of the piece feels very dramatic, and is lit in such a way that seems to suggest its not about how good we are. Our ability to despair, destroy things, wage war, and create things all come across over the course of the video and all of them take part on a never ending cycle a rhytm of life that is much the same as an insect spiralling towards the ground or the DNA within us as humans.

Hooray For Earth - 'True Loves' (Cereal Spiller Remix) Directed by Cyriak

The most striking thing in this animation is the timing, and through the composition the camera simply zooms in the entire time but speeds up and slows down at certain points, the movement is also largely quite uniform along isometric tangents and its through this compositional clarity that gives the music video its visual appeal