I decided it was time to have another dabble with animation. With this I wanted something that would serve double duty as a deeper practice piece to inspire and breathe life into a couple of my favourite characters, and as a final product with potential application.

Again the services of the trusty iPad and Garageband (perfectly intact, though struggling with app functionality these days) and Davinci Resolve were called upon for the post production work.

As I've commented on before, particularly with respect to the complexity of the Cygnus Corridor video (which I hope to produce a new version of some time in the not too distant future), animation can be a challenge for even a half decent PC when you're doing the work in-house, rather than employing a render farm. In the end it took eighteen hours to fill a folder with 1.89Gb of data - 1,100 sequential images rendered in Cycles (averaging one per minute) to produce an 18 second, 60fps, 1080p video. I could have made it significantly quicker by choosing to work at a lower resolution or 24 frames, but there's something so tempting about the buttery smoothness of 60fps. Whatever the case, and as much as it's a bit of a trial, it's also about trying to produce something which can reasonably stand alongside industry quality work.

I produced a series of test renders at the required resolution and quality to gauge the final output, though (excepting the glow) the actual video frames deliberately maintained a tonal neutrality to allow for DaVinci Resolve to act out the post production tweaks.

There's always a little loss in the transfer from the DaVinci workspace to the exported file, and this was no exception. For those who might like a little insight, to tame the banding issues which are native to many a video file, I had DaVinci export the file in DNxHD format (never heard of it until today.. lol) which bangs it out in 10-bit colour space (!), and then converted it into H264. I was feeling cynical but it really did help.. in spite of some banding which was reintroduced by the upload.. the limits of web stuff, eh?

I'd like to give a tip of the hat to the Freesound website, and a few users for their audio work: "reidmangan" for the spotlights, "newlocknew" for the circuit breaker, and last but not least "Vospi" and "jasonelrod" for respectively coughing and blowing their noses so professionally.