Assignment 3 Video Clips

Text Storyboard

This video looks at the exploration of a futuristic city and tries to make evident the idea that cities will one day be highly automated, so much so that humans will be subservient to machines and the built environment. The video shows a more or less sterile environment run by machines and hover-cars, a place where human presence is insignificant. The small urban environment is located on an island platform floating in the depths of space where vehicular transport is not limited to the constraints set by gravity. The city consists of a variety of building types, from traditional rectilinear forms to bizarre curvilinear forms. Connections from one city to the next are by way of a vertical transport duct located on the outskirts of the city. Elements borrowed from the previous assignments relating to "fence" include drama, levity, transparency, release, shift, trace, merge, perforate, imprint, and clarity. Another guiding theme is that of automation.

The video begins with the introduction of a slow rhythmic soundtrack. The opening scene takes the viewer through the inner workings of the future city, inside a workshop completely run by machines. The robots are in the process of building a hover-car before it is released into the city. The old brick workshop gives the impression that something old had once been here, but had been overrun and inhabited by robots. Once the hover-car is released, the audience will get their first view of the deep space futuristic city with hover-cars flying through the air and not a human in sight. The viewer will then be taken on a journey through the city on the back of the recently built hover-car. The video is relatively slow paced so as to give an air of newness and intrigue. Land shots as well as "bird's eye" shots give an overall sense of the city in its context. It is a city in isolation from humans and other life form.

A "fly-through" section of the video takes the viewer on an experiential trip down so called "alley-ways", between levitating roadways, and around the tall landmark buildings in the city's centre. A core theme behind the video is the idea of transparency. This idea encapsulates a series of other themes like "tracing, merging, and perforation".

The backing soundtrack, Carla Bruni's "l'excessive" is used to provide a sense of rhythm both in the transitions between scenes and in the content of the scenes.

10 inspiring words

Reflection of Assignments 1 & 2

For Assignment 1 I extracted, from the theme of fence, the concept of freedom by breaking through boundaries. As a follow-on from this, Assignment 2 concentrated on a more architecturally oriented concept of crossing thresholds with an emphasis on the human spatial experience from one space across a threshold to another. The modeling techniques used for Assignments 1 & 2 were aimed at creating a sense of realism and context to the scene by creating a life-like environment with human characters/ buildings/automobiles etc. Both assignments focused on the literal representation of the concepts rather than an abstract representation. In both assignments I was able to create an engaging sense of movement and rhythm by incorporating musical soundtracks that in themselves evoke themes of danger, release, and exploration. To make Assignment 2 more interesting and evocative, I took the concept of crossing thresholds and implemented it into the transitions between the scenes of the animation.

Specific modeling techniques I experimented with include adding noise modifiers to cameras in order to produce camera shake. The use of reflections, low light, and slow moving camera techniques coupled with a matching soundtrack allowed me to produce a particular feeling of suspense. In the second assignment I used Resolume to add more drama to the animation by creating fragmented yet cohesive transitions between scenes as well as applying colour filters, slow motion effects, reverse effects, and alpha delay effects to help define the pace of the animation. Realism was further explored in 3DS Max through the use of hair/fur modifiers, Raytrace mirror materials, and background photographs of skies and urban environments.