The 1st place winning short film about Toronto, its multicultural values and what that means to me.
Animated in Cinema 4D, with depth of field effects added in After Effects using the plugin Frischluft.
Process
How it got made.
Selected stills for the project, either a in-progress image or a reference.
This project was my final animation assignment for Grade 11 in the CyberARTS program. The prompt came from an Institute Without Boundaries workshop we attended, and my submission won me a summer internship.
The prompt was simple: "What does Toronto mean to you?"
For me, the answer was equally simple: multiculturalism. The harder question was how to show it. The animation had to be under five minutes, and we were free to use any technique we wanted. Since I was most comfortable in Cinema 4D, I used it for both the modelling and the animation.
My concept was to use Toronto's most recognizable landmarks, the CN Tower and SkyDome (Rogers Centre), as a stand-in for the city itself, and have the Earth emerge from them, suggesting that the whole world is part of Toronto. The music box element came from a personal place: music has always been deeply important to me, and given that Toronto is such a musical hotbed, it felt like the right way to capture the city's spirit.
The animation was completed over the three days of the workshop. After winning the competition, it was entered into the Student International Animation Film Festival, where it placed first in the 3D Animation category.
In 2012, I remastered the piece using updated techniques and modern global illumination rendering, exporting a depth pass to add depth of field in post using After Effects. That remaster went on to win the Sony Zirus Competition, with the animation displayed across 20 TVs on a 40-foot screen at the Sony Centre in Toronto, now known as Meridian Hall.
