Digital Media Design Senior Project | Spring 2024
The culmination of many months of intense work, this short film and passion project was created as my senior project for the FGCU Digital Media Design degree program.
Production began in December 2023 with initial storyboarding, then with concept design, modelling, rigging, and basic animation for our automaton heroine. Inspiration for the character's design was taken from characters such as Robo-47 (War of the Monsters), Wall-E, and the Iron Giant. The Robot's overall design was intended to be robust and simplified. Modelling, rigging, and animation was done in Blender and texturing in Adobe Substance Painter.
Inspiration for the story was taken from popular sci-fi films such as Ad Astra, Wall-E, and First Man. I intended to explore themes of isolation, desolation, and loneliness. Due to time constraints, the story had to be significantly altered and reduced at the end stages of production. Originally, the Robot's backstory was that it was one of many "finders" left on Earth to search for any remaining humans who had not managed to flee the Earth with the others. The Robot searched for hundreds of years to no avail, developing somewhat of a personality in the process and eventually coming to loneliness. The building collapsing on his home acted as a narrative device to push the Robot to cross the rubicon and leave Earth. The Robot would then arrive on Mars only to find it polluted and abandoned just as the Earth was. Seeing the ere of man repeated, the Robot returns to the Earth and takes up the responsibility of rebuilding the broken world, signalling to the other bots on scattered across the globe to come to his aid. Eventually, we time-jump to a new, green age in which the Robot's serve as custodians of life on the new Earth.
Core production began in January 2024 with the collection of 3D assets for building out the scenes. Using various collections of models from online, I built out an entire city block for the majority of the film's events. These scenes became massive, with thousands of individual assets instanced across the city using geometry nodes.
Once my sets were built, including the junkyard, the next stage of production was composition, animation, and simulation. I used an initial rough storyboard to guide my creative vision, but being able to place a 3D camera anywhere in the set was immensely helpful for figuring out the right compositions.
All of the simulations and animations were created from the ground up. Starting with a basic fluid simulation domain, it was a matter of trial and error getting the settings right for the meteor strike, rocket take-off, and other effects.
Rigid body simulations were done for the building collapse and metal-hammering shot. To complete the building collapse, the building had to be fractured into individual pieces and then simulated to fall over using forces placed behind the building to literally push it over. Once again, much trial and error was involved in getting it to fall just right. Additional simulations included spawning many tiny falling pieces of glass and rubble, smoke coming out of the hole in the building side, and the final collapse where the building falls on top of another dust engulfs the scene.
Other work included animating the title sequence in After Effects, as well as the countdown sequence and then exporting it as a png sequence to be used as an image sequence texture on an object in Blender; as well as designing the layout for the flyer, which was done with a combination of stock photos, 3D models, and lighting in Blender, and then compositing in Photoshop.
Sound design and editing was done in Premiere Pro using licensed sound effects and music from various providers including Epidemic Sound and Freesound.
BONUS: Stills From Unused Footage
