Oceanic
Runtime: 7 minutes
Synopsis:
The individual dissolves into the collective through the cloud.
This was my first short, and my approach to it was very chaotic and experimental. I was going through this phase where I was really obsessed with the possibility of people merging with technology, neurally connecting to one another through a virtual hive mind. This concept continued to be very prominent in my next two projects after this.
This was originally meant to be a first person walking simulator, running in the Unity game engine, but I had put most of my energy into figuring out how i wanted everything to look, and very little into what the player would actually be doing. The decision to shift from game to video was a result of experimenting with the RealFlow fluid simulation software, and Mental Ray rendering engine in Maya. When I saw how the combination of these two programs could generate very extravagant visuals relatively quickly, I decided to make it into a movie. I was also taking a fluid simulation class at the time, which is a big reason why there's so much floaty goop in this project.
I made each scene individually as their own isolated ideas first, then figured out how they all fit together while editing. I ended up with a rough cut, in which a robotic text-to-speech voiceover helped explain all of it to the audience. After receiving feedback on the rough cut, i went back and rebuilt almost the whole thing to make it communicate my idea more clearly and generally flow better.
The songs I used were from the soundtrack to "Upstream Colour" by Shane Carruth.
Sreenings:
2016 | Oceanic_bin, Atmospheric Animation Screening. Mana Contemporary, Chicago, IL
2016 | Supernova Outdoor Festival of Digital Animation and Art. Denver, Colorado.
2016 | ExFEST 2016. School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago IL.
All modeling, rigging, animation, fluid simulation, and rendering by Nick Flaherty.