ENFRAMING
Run time: 13.5 minutes
Synopsis:
As the planet dies, a fortunate few are able to evacuate to off-world colonies. The rest of humanity is left behind.
This was a story that I had wanted to tell for a long time before actually making it, and the origional vision was much bigger, but a lot of cuts and compromises needed to be made. The core goal of this project was to tell a story that had a more emotional impact on audiences than my previous two projects had. The idea was that it would show two people having a very intimate spiritual connection, then the connection is severed when one of them evacuates from the dying planet to live on some off-world colony.
At the time of making this film, I had very little understanding of character modeling and rigging. I could have spent more time figuring it out before starting this project, but I really wanted to get this done in time for my final senior exhibition at SAIC. So as a compromise, I ended up building these faceless robot figues to represent real people. The whole story was way too ambitious for what i was realistically capable of executing at the time. I would really love to remake this project with fully animated human characters, so the story can be told more clearly.
I used Maya mental ray to render everything in this short. The fluid simulation was made in Realflow. I used a mixamo walk cycle for the final shot of everyone walking, but other than that, all the modeling, rigging, animation, simulation and rendering were done by me.
Sreenings:
2017 | SAIC FVMNA Festival. Gene Siskel Film Center. Chicago, IL.
2017 | Simulythos, Atmospheric Experimental 3D Animation Screening. Chicago IL.