When OddBeast landed the opportunity to produce this year’s opening film for Half Rez, the Midwest’s largest celebration of design and motion graphics, the studio approached the challenge by embracing discomfort. The goal was to visually express the collective anxieties of creatives facing an uncertain future as emerging tools and technologies reshape their industries.
OddBeast Executive Creative Director Kevin Gautraud took the lead on the project’s vision and 3D animation: “I chose to ground the short in responses particular to fears about making a living in today’s creative fields where the rate of change feels insane at times, overwhelming artists with existential questions. Sometimes, ‘I don’t know’ is the most truthful answer anyone can give,” he said.
In creating the film, Gautraud tapped into his own response to such anxieties: a meditation on the vastness of time and our small moment in the light, ponderings that bring him perspective, calm and creative inspiration. Powerful visuals of barren yet eerily majestic landscapes take us back to Earth’s origins, giving way – in the film’s final seconds – to the explosion of life – our blip in the planet’s unfathomable journey. Add the ethereal sound design of Bent Stamnes, and the result is a sense of awe, as everyday problems suddenly seem smaller.
“For this project in particular, I was inspired by Carl Sagan and his own personal philosophy. He was awestruck at the grandeur of nature, curious about the origin of life, and humble about the extent of human knowledge,” Gautraud explained. “It’s about making people feel small, strange and somehow okay with that.”
Gautraud used a range of tools to give his concept life, including QuadSpinner’s Gaea, one of the industry’s leading terrain design platforms for VFX, games and virtual production; Houdini for a handful of simulation-based effects; and Cinema 4D for final assembly and rendering using OctaneRender. A grant to OddBeast from the Render Network Foundation allowed the team to render scenes extremely quickly using their RNDR network platform (distributed render farm), which was critical to the project’s development.
