The Space Between.
THE STORY:
On a peaceful summer's morning, we find the breakfast table set, ready for a gentle start to the day. This cinematic short is my interpretation of Ma (間); emptiness, distance, spaces in between. I visualised this "emptiness" as a quiet moment shared between an elderly couple. A pause in the pervading noise of daily life. It's within this empty moment that the beauty and growth of their bond resides.
SOFTWARE:
Unreal Engine 5 - Render // 3DS Max - Modelling // Tyflow - Simulation // Midjourney + Dalle2 - Concept Generation
Cinematics, Visualisation, Simulation
PROCESS
I created 3 growing plant simulations in tyFlow for 3ds Max. This involved spawning the stem - having it collide with surrounding surfaces, baking a keyframed animation of the leaves unfolding and combining the two to have the leaves growing along the stems path. This process was repeated for each plant using a different leaf texture from Quixel Megascans. The animations were exported as Alembics and brought across to Unreal Engine 5.0 for rendering.
Baked Leaf Animation
Stem Growth
Leaf Spawn + Stem Growth
Stem Collision
AI CONCEPT GENERATION
I used Dall-E 2, an AI system capable of producing detailed images from descriptions, also known as "prompts", during the ideation stage for the vases. I fed the AI words such as; "welded metal pipe, Scandinavian designed vase, product design, 2 pipes connected" to generate a massive amount of concepts, allowing me to adapt and combine elements from my favourites for the final designs.
SETTING THE SCENE
I wanted to give the story context, but still leave it up to interpretation. For this reason I chose to use images to establish the location and the family that inhabits it. Once again I used AI, this time using Midjounrey as well as Dall-E 2, to generate a range of custom concepts in a variety of styles.
BONUS
Here’s an alternative edit for making it this far down the page ;)