No scars (time) - Diptych 3D animation

Project 3 for MDDN314 at VUW: the brief here was to create a diptych video. Since the project was only limited to 2x PAL (4:3) panels, I took the chance to do some 3D work. I remember that everyone else used captured footage, and at the end of the day I only just scraped it in inside the deadline. In fact, I missed so much of the MDDN314 classes during this project that no one really knew what my idea was. Apparently I would have fooled the whole class into thinking it was real if I hadn’t revealed it was entirely created in Maya in my introduction. I blame the crappy projectors for this though, as I had to massively undercut the render quality to get it to render in time to present!

I went through heaps of ideas for this project. All of them were sound, but my expectations for what I could achieve were set a bit high and I shot myself in the foot many times with my ‘raging perfectionist’ gun. I wanted to do a 3D animation right from the start (and I’m happy I did end up using 3D), but the whole way through I found myself thinking big, starting small, and getting frustrated that I wasn’t getting anywhere in the scope of my big idea. At one stage I was going to change direction completely and do a motion info-graphic/text animation, but I’m glad I stuck with 3D.

I changed my project idea five times, ended up with very little time, and (shhh) produced the video the final video in 18 hours over two days. I’m pretty happy with the result, though it could’ve been much better with more time.

The treatment I wrote for this piece was this:

Though it scars all that passes through it, time itself never ages. “No Scars” takes the abstract notion of time and embodies it in a physical object. Normally subject to the effects of time, a mechanical clock is simultaneously fast-forwarded and rewound in time to reflect upon the never aging nature of time.

I used Maya for the 3D modeling, animation and rendering, and pieced the video together in After Effects. Sound effects were created/layered together by me using freesound.org samples as bases.

Unused epic music

My first concept involved a post-apocalyptic environment, so I created some cinematic music to reflect that. I never ended up using the 50 second track for the project, but I still want to use it somewhere as I really like it.

Download the MP3.

If you would like to use this music, you’re free to under the Creative Commons Public Domain licence (CC0). You can download the Reason 4 source file (with loop), and the above version plus a no-drums version in wav format here. It’d be neat to hear how you’ve used it if you want to flick me an email.

Video stills