What do you say to a client that says "Pitch us an idea for a cool art piece and we'll fund it." You say yes! What at first seemed too good to be true, turned out to be one of the most fun projects I've worked on. I had been kicking around an idea in my head for a while. Like many of my ideas, Mitosis began with musical inspiration. I imagined a surreal undersea dreamscape that would evolve along with the music. The song begins with minimal instrumentation and gradually builds in complexity and intensity which conjures up images of a single-celled organism slowly evolving into a more complex being. I also love scuba diving and am fascinated by the strangeness of ocean life. This felt like the perfect setting for my idea, and an ideal playground to design something imaginative. I wanted to take what is already a surreal and abstract world and exaggerate it further to create something vibrant and captivating. The video begins with a single celled organism, and as the complexity of the audio track gradually increases over time, so too does the complexity, quantity, and movements of the organisms. Coral reefs begin to grow and spread, fish undulate, abstract sea plants wiggle and sway in the current and colorful thermal vents explode. The hues and caustic light shimmer as schools of fish swarm until finally it all culminates in one grandiose wide shot of the entire coral reef. The music as well, swells to a grand orchestral climax, accentuating the epic fantastical nature of Mitosis.
Going into this I knew that I wanted to force myself to use Houdini as much as possible as a method of learning through experimentation. I wanted to exaggerate the undersea world and that would require lots of FX work. Although this was an experimental film, I wanted to make a loose game plan. I drew some storyboards and assembled them into a sequential narrative to give myself some structure. I use the term 'loose' because I knew that inevitably things would change. As is common with design through experimentation, you tend to stumble upon happy accidents that you didn't plan for, and conversely many of your original ideas don't work out as well as you thought. For example, originally I had drawn my storyboards to include more recognizable sea creatures such as an octopus and seahorse, but partway through the design process, the decision was made to keep all of the flora and fauna very abstract instead. The below images and videos represent months of experimentation and work, over 47 unique shots and many more that didn't make the final cut.
One of the first challenges I had to tackle was how to create the shimmering caustic light effect that would be present in almost every shot. I knew this lighting would be crucial to make it feel like the scenes are under water. Doing physically based caustic light in 3D is possible but it comes at the heavy cost of long render times. In the end I found a much simpler solution. I bought a stock video of actual caustic light in water and then used that video as a black and white animated gobo light map which I projected all my lights through. That plus some volumetric rays were really effective in selling the lighting.
