Ouroboros
Senior Thesis
Growth is created by making uncomfortable decisions. Decisions that are scary at the time, but incredibly necessary. When presented with the choice between change and familiarity, most will choose the latter. Despite knowing that this decision causes suffering and distress. This is Ouroboros.
Music: Son Lux - Yesterdays Wake
process
This idea had been in the works since July of 2022, going through constant updates in narrative, complexity, and design. I started the process by choosing the music and basing my pacing and design in my head first before storyboarding. Jotting initial boards in a notebook before anything else helped me work out some angles.
Around October 2022 I started planning out the basic structure with the main story beats detailing the bare minimum info needed to tell the story.
Going through more revisions, in December 2022 I started to write out the shot descriptions which would then lead me to create the final storyboards.
boards vs. final frames
Coming in at 45 unique shots, it was very important that the preproduction for this project was as concrete as possible. This meant boarding each shot and sticking to it was essential to ensure the final product represented the initial idea.
texturing
I utilized 2 main methods for achieving this "painterly" look. For wide shots showing large environments with dynamic camera moves, I did my best to come up with a technique that was relatively efficient and art directable. This method involves a mixture of cloning multiple brush stroke textures through each environment, and manual placement for full control. This doesn't work for hero elements so for that I opted to use a different method.
Method 01: Scattering brush textures on geo
The second method I used involved painting over the frames in Photoshop and utilizing EbSyth to interpolate the painted frame onto the rest of the animation. This was a great solution but would not be scaleable to any project larger than this as the process was rather complicated.
Method 02: Paint over 3D frame
compositing
Nuke was an essential part of the production for this piece and the scenes were built for the Nuke comp that would follow. Ebsynth is what I used to transfer the painted frame onto the output from C4D. Ebsynth needs the values to remain consistent in order to keep an accurate track. I knew I needed flashing lights so what I needed to do was export light passes for each scene and paint over each light pass individually. This would give me much finer control of the scene.
I was then able to composite the painted frames using the original animation's motion blur and depth of field by copying that info onto the png sequence outputted by Ebsynth.
timelapse
While working I decided I would like a timelapse of me working for additional processes. Here you can see a glimpse of my workflow.
