davidpaulrosser{blog}

What does the future mean to you?

My first assignment set at the University of Brighton is to create a future theme based animation. This animation is for the White Night Festival on the 24th October 2009.This assignment will enable me to share my vision of the future and hopefully influence people on what might occur in the forthcoming events.

Research

(This is an overcast of what my paper research detailed.)

The definition of future

The future is a time period commonly understood to contain all events that have yet to occur. It is the opposite of the past and is the time after the prescent. Source

The digital future

My initial research first takes me to the digital era. What might and could happen if we lose control over AI. I watched several clips  from a documentary called “Visons of the future“. Dr Michio Kaku leads the documentary and talks about three possible revolutions:

• The Intelligence revolution
• The biotech revolution
• The quantum revolution

I was quite amazed when I watched a clip from “The quantum revolution”. Dr Michio Kaku interviews prof Neil Gershenfeld (Centre for Bits and Atoms, MIT). Gershenfeld discuss their reserach on programming materials. Esentially manipulating atoms to modify proteins. This could lead to self regenerating organisms.

A quote I read on the BBC Horizon says that “It’s predicted that by 2029 computer intelligence will equal the power of the human brain”. Thats a very frightning thought. As the way technology is improving rapidly fast are we even prepared on what could esentially happen?

During an interview with Susan Greenfield (BBC Science and Nature) she dicusses the future of computer intelligence. She said that computers don’t have a consciousness, they only think logically. I can say I agree with her statement. In my opinion I would say its impossible to program human emotion.

Religion

Religion has always been a thought provoking topic for those with and without belief. I can say that my Christian upbringing has always influenced my thoughts on life. I came across the idea of producing an animation to detail Christianity’s vision of the future. As the brief details “What does the future mean to you?” I thought it would be a thought provoking experience for the crowd to watch.

I propose to set the animations scene on the “Book of Revelation”. My main objective is not to cause offence, but to get people discussing Christainity and look it from another perspective than the one of their own.

A 3D model of Brighton’s Unitarian Church

I modelled a replica of Brighton’s Unitarian Church exterior in Maya. This will prove a great help during the development process of the animation. Here are a few screenshots:

Template Projection

Constantine Screenshot Projection

Constantine Screenshot Projection

The storyboard

I revised the storyboard around four times. Each revision simplified my idea. The animation is now based on the decisions we make during our lives. These decisions (good or bad) lead us through life, and determine our future.

The story is visualized through symbolic imagery. I have selected a variety of symbols that the audience can relate to with the animation. These symbols will represent: direction, temptation, religion, faith, greed, moral values, idols and judgement.

I want to ask the audience a question at the end of the animation. Possibly, “Where does your pathway lead to?” This should hopefully provoke the audience to think about their future.

The animation will be roughly 30 seconds long. Each symbol will be shown for around 3 seconds.
Here is the draft version of the storyboard:

Animation progress

So… I started out creating the assets for the environment. I had a pretty solid idea of how I wanted it to look. This was one of the first test renders:

As you can see I have a room for the symbols (positive and negative), and some nice cloud effects from Maya to give a sense of reality. I basically wanted the symbols to animate in and out of the room. After rendering out a few seconds of the scene I realized how boring this would actually be. A bunch of objects fading in and out wouldn’t be something very interesting to watch. Luckily I still had enough time to develop my idea a little further.

I started drawing away and came up with the concept of the symbols in various rooms. Each room could represent a decision or path you choose in your life. I polished this idea and came up with 9 different rooms for the animation. The animation would consist of a camera flying through each room. This would obviously be a more interesting approach for the message I want to deliver to the audience.

So here’s the description of each room and what it symbolizes and represents:

• Room 1: The title – Revelation – The act of revealing or unveiling (Greek definition)
• Room 2: The pathway – A tree to symbolize the pathway of life
• Room 3: Temptation – An apple to represent the choice of whether to act or not on a situation. Also refers to the (Garden of Eden)
• Room 4: Evil – A snake to symbolize all sin and evil acted out – holding a skull that refers to death
• Room 5: Greed and power – Money to symbolize greed and obsession
• Room 6: Idolization – A woman painted in gold to symbolize excessive admiration or obsession with a living person or object
• Room 7: The Ten Commandments: The Ten Commandments cast in stone to symbolize moral rules in which we may or may not live out lives by
• Room 8: The cross: A cross to symbolize faith, direction and Christianity
• Room 9: Judgment: Gates to determine a decision to whether your being rewarded or punished for the life you have lead

Here’s a few more updated renders of the scene from Room 1 and Room 7:

The audio

The brief requested that the audio we use was free from copyright. As I don’t deal with the production of audio I had to find some suitable royalty free music to use. This was an absolute nightmare. In total I searched for 10 hours trying to find free audio to use. I did have my eye on two tracks in particular. However the tracks were unavailable to use after I contacted the license rs.
I did eventually find a track. The track is called Lacrimosa. It is available to buy from Stockmusic.net. I bought a license for £20. Now I can use the track publicly for any project I wish to include it in. The track lacrimosa is the Latin word for “weeping”. Even though my animation doesn’t portray weeping in its context, it still provides a suitable accomplice to the visual aspect.

I now have to wait roughly 60 hours to render the animation in Maya

After rendering 300 frames of the animation on preview quality I realized that I wouldn’t have enough time to render the other 700 frames. I changed the quality to draft. There isn’t a major difference between the two settings. But id rather have enough time for post production than to worry about having an incomplete animation.

Post production

After 72 hours of rendering I was finally able to start post production. The 950 frames I rendered out came to 2.75 GB. Each frame was around 3mb. I had to re-render the last 150 frames too as I had glitches in the cloud particles.

I followed a tutorial on Video Copilot on how to make some nice light rays that showed up particles. This worked well with the beginning and end sequence of my animation. I was able to adapt this learnt technique and integrate it with my composition.

During the post production stage I had many infuriating moments with After Effects. Some of these problems were the program crashing and the render queue freezing whilst rendering out the animation.
After reading somewhere on the web I was able to export my completed animation with the correct codec detailed in the brief specification.

The completed animation

I can say that I never expected this project to go smoothly. I had a variety of ambitious ideas when I started researching. These ideas were later refined to something I could actually produce for this project with the given deadline. I was able to finish this project in time because I worked to a schedule. Without careful time keeping this animation would have never been completed. Even though I had to sacrifice the quallity of some frames to complete it in time, Im still happy with the quality of the final outcome. The only critique I would give myself is of the cameras flythrough animation.

I hope that everyone who views this gets something out of it. As that was my objective from the start.

Revelation from David Rosser on Vimeo.

As you may, or may not know, I attended Flash on the beach this year at Brighton. The event took place on the 20th to the 23rd of September. To describe the whole experience of the event would be “Flash heaven”. It blew my mind away. I couldn’t fault any aspect of it. There was a vast range of topics from international speakers. The sessions that I enjoyed the most were by Grant Skinner, Carlos Ulloa and Jer Thorp.

I would like to thank John Davey and all the other event organizers for such an amazing experience. I will be definitely be attending next year and the years to come.