Programmed Emotion

Brief: Create a personal piece that evokes and captivates viewers, using relatable themes and metaphors inspired from life events and experiences.

PROGRAMMED EMOTION

Inspired by personal events, Programmed Emotion deals with the struggles that come from being separated or isolated from a person who is important to you, and how the emotions that come with that event slowly eat away at you, until your forced to find peace within yourself and come to terms with what has happened.

Moral: Persistence in the face of great struggle, can lead to the greatest growth.

SUBJECT:

This story is visualized through a man who is trapped in containment, and is forced to endure a treatment called "Programmed Emotion." This treatment is an attempt to forcefully make a person relive their worst emotions through induced abstract dreams.

This was my first project using Houdini, and it was a huge undertaking. A lot of the effects I wanted to do were pretty complex, and would require more than what C4D could offer. I received a great deal of help on this from my Houdini/Nuke teacher Christian Huthmacher.

Each room had its own challenges.

The Lab: Electricity.

Despair Room: Melting Man and Growing Splines.

Sadness Room: Growing Crystals.

Anger Room: Growing Flames.

A large challenge of this project was the typography. A majority of the structure of the story is built around these various emotions the main character is feeling, and portraying them in an impactful way was really important.

So my solution was to use this bold white, red, and green code on a black, noisy, glitching screen to represent the inner turmoil of the main character in digital form.

After all the animation, typography, and pacing was done, the last step was to improve the visuals using Nuke to color correct and color grade the final footage. 

Cryptomattes were a massive help in this part of the process, allowing me to go very in depth with the CC of specific objects and textures.

The completion of this project was a huge relief, since it was a story I really wanted to tell. All together this was easily the biggest challenge I've ever undertaken in regards to concept, animation, design, and just overall scope. In the end I learned a lot, and was able to create something pretty close to what I had envisioned!