This all happened quite quickly, and believe it or not I wasn't even aiming towards it. I started to look into animating objects on a path and fell down a learning rabbit hole.. from a desire to animate a handful of fireflies, to a wormhole wrapped around a "what if.." principle, relating to the possible look of a Doctor Who movie at the cinema. It's funny what happens when you let go of creative expectations..

The overall process followed my usual Blender/Garageband/DaVinci Resolve workflow to bring it all together.

As a general aside I've learned that letting Blender create your animation as a series of PNG files rather than as a straight video file is generally the more worthwhile choice. The con is that you'll probably end up with a relatively LARGE folder for your trouble, although working with animations and video will almost always cost you significant hard drive space. The pros however are pretty significant. In the first instance the quality of your frames is better, and no more troublesome to bring into DaVinci. Secondly, and perhaps more compelling, if you have a series of PNG stills and there's an issue with your render you can isolate any re-rendering to an array of specific frames, without having to render the whole thing again. If it's a five second animation that might not amount to much, but if it's a few mins in length believe me you'll notice. Blender automatically spits out the PNG's as a sequence of numbered images (0000, 0001 etc..), so if you have to re-render a batch of frames, say frames 0320 to 0480 out of a batch numbering from 0001 to 4800, you can isolate that range, re-render and simply 'drag and drop' the new PNG's to overwrite the unwanted frames. Additionally in this workflow your frames are brought into your video project via the folder they reside in, so when you overwrite your old frames DaVinci will be automatically using the new images.

In the case of this project it was (for a change) rendered in the Eevee engine rather than Cycles - to the uninitiated this means the process was significantly quicker, so concerns of time are lessened somewhat, but it's sauce for the goose when you're running any project and there's wisdom in taking any speed benefits when they come your way.

The creation of the wormhole itself was deceptively simple. Having created cables before now for various assets in the archviz projects it came as little surprise to me that this was the core principle for crafting a tunnel (you begin to anticipate these little perceptions as you learn modelling). The length of the Bezier tube was the main consideration - size balanced against the frames per second and number of overall frames determines the general speed of your animation. The gaseous glowing appearance so beloved of these wormhole simulations was achieved by applying an emissive procedural noise texture to the skin of the cable as it were, adjusting the detail level as desired and applying alpha blend to the material for the transparency, following basic black and white tones for principles of masking.

As for the animation itself, that DID actually loop back (no pun intended) to the original goal, which rather than relating to a firefly actually became a matter of concern for the camera itself. In this case it became the camera which was to be animated on the path, paired to (though) the "cable".

At least I have something to go back to the fireflies with..

Garageband seems to be my mainstay for creating music and sound effects these days. In the longer term, for greater flexibility, I think I'd like to take the time to resurrect my old Acer PC for music making. It's a pain that Apple's principles have effectively rendered my old iPad more redundant than the actual hardware itself, which still seems to be quite sufficient. Garageband suffers from a few quirks which are probably resolved now, but the development stopped at iOS 9.3.5 for this beast, so.. Until I get to the PC it can serve its purpose in the broadest sense.

As for DaVinci, the more I use this program the more I like it as a video editor. It's true that I haven't used the Adobe video editing component of the suite, but this works very well, even though at times I keep running up against the limitations of the free version. I'll have to add that aspect to the list of things to get to, but in terms of basic editing it has the matter covered and is a delight to use. To maximise quality I learned from the hallowed pages of You Tube that a two step process with the creation of the video file is beneficial. Rather than directly rendering the video to your container (usually MP4) of choice, there's an intermediate step which benefits the quality - sending it out to a Quicktime DXnHD 10-bit file and then taking that through a converter (in my case Wondershare Uniconverter) seems to produce better quality, most noticeable by less banding in any smooth video gradients. This was particularly apparent in the previous Kokorogenic logo animation, where the stage lighting was characteristically prone to this. This fast moving project is perhaps not so prone in that respect, but the visual quality of the exported file seems to have also benefitted somewhat locally. Online video files are pretty much always subjected to some form of local compression.