How long is the lifespan of a utopia? What happens to those that expire?
For this project I revisited my childhood ideas of what a utopia could look like and reflected on what I’ve kept, lost and left behind.
For this project I revisited my childhood ideas of what a utopia could look like and reflected on what I’ve kept, lost and left behind.
2022 // 2:48 min, 3D animation, Blender & Davinci Resolve // Propädeutikum - Fachprojekt Animation, 4 weeks
Process
The theme for the project was utopia. I wanted to create a piece that centered on the time aspect, so I began to think about what utopia has meant to me over the years. Stability, change, relationships, passion - depending on what was going on in my life, but time keeps moving and lot of my old ideals or plans for the future have faded.
I wanted to depict this feeling of change on neutral ground, so I tried to abstract it in a way that kept the emotions behind it recognizable.
space debris was my first animation using blender, so I decided on a low poly style to ensure I would have enough time and wiggle room for the learning process.
concept art
In preparation for the project I drew up a rough draft of my idea and created an animatic. The animatic leans more heavily on my references and also features scenes in the "real world". I decided to leave these out because it felt too heavy handed.
The topics that inspired the planets were - my childhood home, my cultural ties, old friends, hobbies.
method
prompt for ice cream planet
base storyboard
keyframing
The planning for each scene started with a very vague storyboard and a planet design. Every planet features an introductory, retrieval and exit scene. After the first planet I realized that sketching in 2D wasn't always compatible with my 3D workflow, so I came up with a prompt for each planet that I wanted to be in the final scene. I then began to focus on sketching out movement patterns over plot.
example of orbits
The movement of the spaceship is quite straightforward, so I was able to play with the camera movement as well which made things feel more dynamic despite their simplicity. I mainly worked with rotation & orbits. In total I made over 30 scenes and roughly 20 of those made it to the final render.
text draft
beginning text
end text
The final step in the project was editing the footage. My original plan was to create a voiceover of a poem I had written, but I felt that it was superfluous and took away from the immersion. So I picked out some of my favorite lines and spliced them into the text above to tie everything together.
The music and sound effects are from artlist.io.