DarkLight Animation Case Study
The purpose of this project was to create a short animation that built suspense, fit a retro-science fiction theme and create an environmental space. It was over a 5 week span leaving little room for mistake or on-the-fly experimentation.
The story involves an unknown wave of energy passing through space that collides with a survey ship turning the last remaining crew member into a unstable creature of energy that quickly falls apart and implodes on itself.
This project was going to be highly stylized and needed a large amount of references. Inspiration was taken from cassette futurism, Ron Cobbs concept work for the 'Aliens' franchise, fusion reactors, real spaceship environments from the ISS and other various science fiction works that fit the overall aesthetic. After a thorough collection of refences it was time to begin concept work
Concept work consisted largely of coming up with a semi believable design for a spaceship that could host a crew of 4-8 people comfortable in space for long periods of time while also serving work stations. The result was a 3 floored hexagonal ship with 3 larger segmented rooms for each floor and a centrally located reactor or power source.
The initial ideas for the black hole creature was layers of moving static or a completely black, figure with no reflections at all. Both of these ideas did not end up working out as it left only the silhouette for the viewer to try and discern any kind of direction or movement from the creature. In the end the decision was made to have a slight specularity on the creature in addition to light emissions giving the viewer a better understanding of the creatures changing form.
Creating the storyboard was the next step. With the projects tight deadline the initial story ideas were trimmed over a few times to keep the project within scope, but still maintain the overall vision and narrative to the audience.
Detailed documents were created including creative brief iterations, asset lists, to-do lists, and passes for lighting, camera placement and layout. Each one of these lists were reviewed weekly similar to an agile workflow taking input from peers and applying changes to the next sprint.
A lot of work was done in the 5 week span on the project consisting of an entire ship block out at real world scale. The creation of the wave simulation, creation of high poly assets, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging of the creature, multiplying and offsetting animations, effects, etc. Towards the 3 week mark the scene files had become too big. Starting ideas of creating the entire ship as a single asset to be later imported to a game engine for real time exploration were no longer feasible. Everything that didn't exist within the camera shot needed to be removed. This gave a much more manageable pipeline that catered to the animation and effects.
Throughout the 5 weeks the projects took several turns and reproach to work flows. Music sourcing and scene cuts gave the finished animation a greater feeling of horror than was initially planned, but overall I am pleased with the work that resulted.