CD Will MacNeil, who’s been working with weareseventeen following the closure of The Mill, opened the first OFFF Montreal conference yesterday with this thoughtful sequence he describes as a “manifesto on creativity in our turbulent world”.

Will MacNeil: “There’s so much pressure on creative people right now. Forces from technology, politics and economics are all impacting the way we see and express ourselves. This film seeks to push back and remind the OFFF community that all our ideas matter.

“In researching the piece, I noticed how many visual metaphors from the design world could help illustrate my feelings. Such as ink chromatography showing how inks and dyes aren’t made of a single color. This felt like a good way to describe how we are all more than a single ideology or belief system.
 

“There’s so much pressure on creative people right now. Forces from technology, politics and economics are all impacting the way we see and express ourselves. This film seeks to push back and remind the OFFF community that all our ideas matter.”

 
“Other metaphors in the film are:
• DNA sequencing to show how our differences are critical to our survival
• Diagrams of atoms in motion and under strain to describe the forces behind both disagreement and empathy
• Motion tracking and ASCII text rendering of a dancer to show how digital art is based on human expression
• An L-System tree to show how many simple ideas can come together to form something beautiful

“We used timelapse photography with a soft lightbox for the first few ink chromatography shots and then took an open approach to the rest of the film, using a mix of tools including Touch Designer for the ASCII rendering and motion tracking shots, as well as Cinema 4D, Cavalry, and After Effects.

“By far the most used tool was Houdini and the newest 2D COPs features. These were especially useful for the remaining ink separation shots, where I put a lot of time into getting an authentic and highly detailed effect of the colors stretching and breaking apart.

“This involved mixing layers of distortion driven by procedural noises with additional noise patterns driving hue adjustments. I had to embrace a lot of randomness and search out the moments where the colors bled in beautiful but realistic ways.

“COPs was also used to simulate the look of the various grids of dots and squares which are actually driven by an underlying 2D fluids simulation to give the sequence constant, organic motion. The rendered simulation then controls the appearance of the dots, grid and other forms in the sequence.”
 
 

 
Client: OFFF Montréal

Production: weareseventeen
Director/animator: Will MacNeil
EP: Hugh Ip
Additional animation: Aung Thant Kyaw
Title design: David Davies
Photography: Joe Coleman
Producer: Nehanda Roberts

Music/sound design: Box of Toys
VO: Nehanda Roberts