“ASCENSION”

Overview

I created this short film in Blender in my sophomore spring semester as my final project for Brown's CSCI 1280: Intermediate Computer Animation. What was originally supposed to be a quick 20-30 second demo of an art-directed environment spiraled into a 3-minute animated short over two months of work.

Stills

Shot breakdown

The inspiration

My inspiration for this project started back in late 2023 when I worked on a facial-mechanical rig test to experiment with these kinds of mechanical faces inspired by Ghost in the Shell, Cyberpunk 2077, and the WAI short. I originally intended on integrating the facial rig and mechanical pieces into a full character rig to then animate for a quick ~5 second animation, but integrating all the pieces of the mechanical rig into a full body rig (and rigging the actual face itself) ended up being a lot of trouble, and I never got it working completely. I also then had to consider hair and cloth simulation, none of which I had any experience in, so I ended up scrapping the idea.

Instead, in the same month I ended up creating a roughly 30 second urban/cyberpunk inspired short set on the rooftop of a building (on my Instagram, but not listed on my website) which did not use any of these elements that I had been working on for characters. However, as my second attempt at working on a solo Blender short film (my first failed attempt was in 2020 during COVID for a high school art project), I ended up learning a lot from seeing what worked and what failed over the course of the project that ended up helping me a lot when creating this film two years later.

Fast forward to my sophomore spring semester at the beginning of 2025, when my Computer Animation professor briefed us on the class final project, I knew I wanted to spend more time creating a larger passion project. Our assignment was to spend roughly a month towards the end of the semester to dive deeper into any topic in CG of our choosing. Since I was able to allocate a class's worth of time and my free time to this project, I wanted to create some kind of animation to mainly demonstrate set creation, lighting, and character work. With that in mind, my original pitch for my project ended up sounding very ambitious for the given timeline, so I scaled down what I promised to deliver, but still intended on fulfilling my goals with the project. Although the class was in Maya, my previous experience in CG was all in Blender, and due to Blender Cycles being a GPU based render engine, I made the case to my professor to allow me to use Blender for my project in order to be able to iterate as quickly as possible.

When I was coming up with ideas of what I wanted to make, I knew I wanted to expand on the character tests that I had done in 2023, but also wanted to work on interior sets and interior lighting, since almost all of my previous work had been set with outdoor lighting. I also wanted to include a nature scene, since I was most comfortable with making those kinds of sets at the time. To make all these possible within the same project and fulfill another creative urge of mine, I decided to make the theme of my film escapism, with the protagonist living in a retro-futuristic dystopia, yearning for some world that no longer exists.

The character

Because character creation had the most new elements to me, I decided to tackle that first in the project. I started working on the project about half a month early in the class schedule, working on the character at the same time as my other assignments from the class to ensure I wouldn't go too late into the project realizing I couldn't finish the character. I started by taking a high-resolution facial scan from 3DScanstore, then photoshopped the face texture and sculpted the head that the texture was mapped onto to achieve the look I was aiming for. I then added in pore textures to the face, subsurface scattering for realistic skin lighting, and a layer of specular in certain regions for facial oil. Once I had the face fully detailed, I merged the head to a separate, lower detail full body scan. Since the character would be clothed, the connecting seam between the head (which included a bust) and the body would not be visible under the clothes.

With the time constraints that I had, I didn't have time to go deep into character rigging, especially since I was not planning on spending a lot of time on character animation (in fact at the start, I only intended to pose the character), so I used Mixamo's automatic character rig generator to create a rig for my character. Once I had the rig, I was able to download motion capture data to animate my character moving within the space. I then used Marvelous Designer to get clothing onto my character, and simulate the cloth reacting to my character's movements for each shot with movement. I then exported the alembic files for my character and the cloth simulation to bring into the scene.

The set

On a trip to visit my grandparents in Tainan over the winter, I had stumbled across this taxidermy store that heavily inspired some of the visuals in my film.

When working out the look of my set, I gravitated towards a Blade Runner-esque retro-futuristic look, but was also attracted to the idea of taxidermy; I thought that the preservation of animals and other specimens was in a way fitting with the theme of the film. The protagonist is driven by a yearning and fascination for nature (which only existed in the past in this world), so I thought it would make sense for him to collect taxidermy and other types of specimens.

I was particularly inspired by the wet specimens and diaphonized specimens, and made these two shots of these objects.

I also saw this hallway leading into a random building in Tainan and loved the color and texture on the green tile. I ended up creating a hallway/elevator scene inspired by this hallway as a sort of liminal space to bridge the room to the dream sequence.