For their sixth semester project, Max Schwugier and Yannik Wenk teamed up to create this abstract journey of a spherical protagonist, starting in a realistic and ordinary kitchen interior, then flying/bouncing/rolling through different worlds and moods before finally joining the real world again.
The goal was to create an escapist film that deals with current emotions and longings without actually mentioning or showing anything too specific.
We were fortunate enough to get the Sound Design done by the talented Rhizome Audio & Jürgen Branz.
A small collection of some still images we like most.
The whole film was rendered on our personal computers consisting of one 2xRTX3090 and one 1xRTX3090 rig. Rendertimes were about 5min/frame for the most shots with maximum render time going up to 20min/frame for shots with a lot of scattering involved.
At the beginning of the project we set ourselves time for an extensive Research&Development phase in which we were allowed to explore all kinds of simulations, animations, set ups, shaders and moods. Below is just a short excerpt of some of our polished and not so polished experiments.
We didn't set ourselves any boundaries for the initial R&D phase which resulted in a wide variety of moods. One of the challenges for production was to let everything come together and look like a cohesive film. The shot below shows our progression from a rough R&D sketch to the final frame.
For our production workflow we mainly used Cinema 4D, Houdini, Redshift Render as well as Adobe After Effects for compositing/post-production and Adobe Premiere for editing.
Throughout the whole project we worked within the ACES colour space, from input textures to output exr's.
Even though the production team only consisted of two people, a shot list was crucial for our workflow to track shot progresses, open tasks, current states of shots as well as the overall progression of the project.
Credits:
3D & Direction: Maximilian Schwugier & Yannik Wenk
Sound Design: Rhizome Audio & Jürgen Branz
Lecturer: Rosa Rohm
Produced @ Faculty of Design, University of Applied Sciences Augsburg
