Skill/Ability: 3D Printing Pre-Production

Titan is the story of this cycle, illustrating the interplay between several of its permutations; a cloud of krill, a whale, fisherman, and their environment.

Currently in development, this film will combine traditional as well as 3D animation, 2D fx/compositing and digital illustration. It is the most recent product of my ongoing musical collaboration with programmer, musician and artist Walter Harris. What began solely as an attempt to rebuild a functional musical partnership through the internet eventually yielded the process by which Titan was imagined.

Interestingly, the inability to physically play in the same space, combined with the flexibility of digital audio production strengthened our desire to compose, and much more time was spent actually discussing the ideas and emotions to be expressed that traditionally would have been developed through jam sessions in a practice space.

This process lent itself to becoming increasingly visual as well as narrative to facilitate communication. We eventually found that developing narrative structures was a key motivator in our mode of production. Narrative inspired composition is certainly not new, as many bands have often cited such inspiration for their work. What may be unique for our process in this regard is that developing visual and thematic ideas outside of a practice space was the only way to energize the creative process over such a distance.

The Bellows March was at one time a pilot initiative between UMBC visual arts faculty Eric Dyer and the Imaging Research Center. The goal was develop a production pipeline that would successfully allow Dyer and his production assistants to build animated sculptures in 3D space with the goal of physically printing them by utilizing rapid prototyping technology. I partnered directly with Dyer to develop the specific techniques and overall production design. The goal was to produce one of these kinetic sculptures or “cinetropes” as a proof of concept. The clip here showcases an excerpt from his finished film, The Bellows March, that include animation that I designed. I also developed the unique character rigging for the interesting concertina character central to the film. Additional information can be found here.