2010 Wildscreen Stings

Over the summer, the students of the animation course were asked if we wanted to pitch an idea for the 2010 Wildscreen Festival stings. Since last year, they've been done with UWE students. Sarah May Little, Sam Walsh and I decided to have a go at it. We figured we needed to incorporate the festival's branding naturally into the sting, so we came up with the idea that fireflies would come out at night to spell out the festival's logo.

Here's some of the material from the project. The first is our initial test for the fireflies flying out and spelling the word 'Wildscreen,' done in Maya with particle simulation. This was my responsibility, since Sam and Sarah had their hands full with the flash animation.

Wildscreen Firefly Particle Effects from Chris Raadjes on Vimeo.

We wanted a more natural flock of fireflies though. The solution wasn't entirely obvious, but in the end we found out we could use goal animation to make particles go wherever we wanted. That proved to be a very nice break, as we ran through four entirely different scene set ups - none of which functioned as nicely as goal animation.

Wildscreen Firefly Particle Effects from Chris Raadjes on Vimeo.

The music for the stings was done by the awesome Samuel Bordoli. Sam was a delight to work with - he turned out the final piece of music in a single day after we gave him the rough animatic. Hearing it on Films@59 (who kindly helped us out with the sound mixing) speakers was nothing short of amazing.