Compositing & Special Effects (Final Project)

Nov 12 '18 - Nov 30 '18 (Week 12-Week 14)
Gilbert Evander Aligoey (0332508)
Compositing and Special Effects
Final Project

Concept & Idea

The task that was given for the final project of this module is to;

" Create an expressive motion graphic short which narrates the current technological impact on human nature and how to overcome this crisis. A thorough research and problem statement need to be spelled out along with objective. Can be any medium approach that manifests a seamless narration. "

But after some discussion with the lecturer, he finally gave us the freedom to choose any topic and theme of this project and told us to look for references to get the idea of what we might construct for this project.

References

The first concept that I was thinking about is typography and shapes motion graphics such as the videos below.

But then, considering we only have around 2 - 3 weeks to do this, including all other subjects combined, I decided to not do something too ambitious. Hence, I look for more references, and I stumbled upon something that shows abstract 3d animations from a software called Cinema4D.

The second video is what inspired me the most. It basically shows what are the things you can do using this software in a short period of time.
The animations inside it are the works that we want to show and inside must follow and visualize the sound that is used in the video.

Therefore, only two option are available for me, which is to create a fully-typography and 2D shapes motion graphic or learn Cinema4D and see what are the things that I can create in there. With that said, I chose Cinema4D since I can learn new thing as I go.

StoryBoard

Storyboard exist to make us consistent with the path that we want it to be from the first place, which is to follow the plan. I do have a lot of things that I wanted to visualize using this software, but since I don't know the basics, tools and how this software works, I cannot say for sure that I have a fixed storyboard, but I have some visualization that I came up with when I found the song that fits perfectly for this abstract motion showreel which is available below followed by the storyboard.

Work Process

First and foremost, the sound is edited into a shorter length since the requirements for this final project is 45 seconds and the animations that need to be done is too much if it goes to a longer extent.

I added Parametric EQ and Studio Reverb to modify the sound to make it more expressive at some points. Besides that, I started on looking for tutorials and things that could make me do something in this short period of time, which is helpful and I understand it easily. Modeling, animating, coloring and texturing was not really much of a big deal for me at this point. But then when it comes to rendering, it was tedious.

I said it was tedious because imagine if one of the model animation takes about 120 frames, and you can render it straight into a video if you want, but that would mean you can't edit the video freely as if it's an image. So in my case, I would render it into the format of PNG, which means it will export each one of those 120 frames into an image one by one. So let's say one frame will take 10 minutes to render (which is still considered fast according to my PC's specification), it means that it takes roughly 1200 minutes (20 hours). In some cases, the time to render some frames could take either longer or faster, depending on the GPU and Graphics card inside the PC itself, so it is quite unstable.

There are even some animations I have that finish the rendering after 4 days, but in the end, I still manage to do it.

Below are some screenshots of my work processes that I have inside Cinema4D.