How to Introduce a Universe in 3 Minutes
Since launching our reveal trailer, we have had a few followers write in to ask about the creation process. The Cellarius (CX) team began creating this animated short when the Universe Guide was just a rough draft. So how did it all come together?
The trailer is an introduction to the Cellarius franchise, so we wanted it to raise our central question of, “Whose Future Is It?”. This tagline is double-edged: it refers to the user-defined canon aspect of the project as well as the in-universe tension between humanity and technology, which we want the community to explore and debate. In the trailer the audience begins to see the motivations of both the AI and the rebel factions. Neither side is necessarily “right.” We wanted to provide some background information about the CX universe with plenty of action to engage viewers.
We were lucky to get to work with the talented team at Spacejunk, who adapted elements of the lore and style guide into scripts:
“There’s a whole lot to unpack in the this extremely unique project. We weren’t just launching a trailer to get an audience to want to consume media, we were trying to genuinely excite people to participate in creating new content that takes place the Cellarius Universe. Our objective was to provide backstory and build the world while developing a narrative that shows the audience the true potential of the kinds of stories that can be told with this new and exciting franchise. And we had to figure out how to make that work in under three minutes! Figuring out the storytelling math on this was a super fun challenge.
The Cellarius Universe Guide was a tremendous springboard for the Launch Trailer. Every page sparked about twenty new ideas that could have filled an entire video. That’s what led us to set the opening scene in the museum-like Information Center. It was the perfect device to pack the trailer absolutely full of Easter eggs for astute viewers to explore and potentially use as fuel to develop their own stories.”
—Kevin Rapp, an art director at Spacejunk
Our teams collaborated to refine the script into an early version of the short. The story centers on a robotic tour guide extolling the great works of Cellarius before getting blasted by Vindict raiders, who then broadcast a less rosy history lesson. But the Vindicts are not the “good guys,” either — they separate families in the name of “decoupling” people linked to the AI. As we mentioned in our post on Blockpunk, we don’t know the AI’s true motives, and we wanted to avoid the cyberpunk trope of a sinister machine attempting to wipe out humanity.
“One thing we wanted to avoid was an omniscient narrator that just explains the world in a black and white fashion. The Cellarius Universe has so much room for ambiguity and nuance, so we came up with the idea of dueling narrators that provide conflicting accounts of history as a way to leave room for other potential collaborators to explore the moral shades of gray on both sides of the struggle.”
— Kevin Rapp
Once we finalized the script, Spacejunk began work on storyboards. These sequential sketches would set up the composition of key scenes for the animation. The storyboards are a vital phase of the animation process, the step that converts the script into a visual concept and format. This early stage is when most of the editing takes place, as it’s much simpler to modify the initial sketches than finished art.
Spacejunk began turning the storyboards into a rough animatic short. Spacejunk provided placeholder voiceovers so that we could time out the length of the shots. In the meantime, we started working on concept and character sketches, honing in on the specifics of the designs. Our composer also worked on scoring the piece based on the shots and transitions.
The team at Spacejunk is unique for their use of camera projection, which takes flat artwork and renders 3D planes around them to create animation. Each moving shot is actually a 2D art asset that gets sliced and animated to create a dynamic scene. Here is a great a short video from their team about how the process works:
Around the same time, we began recruiting voice talent for each of the three speaking roles: the cheery robotic tour guide, the battle-weary Vindict leader Idra, and the supportive Joaquim. As in the other shorts we’ve released so far (“Strongman” & :Where To?”), we’re aiming to create interesting situations for our users to build upon, leaving the backstories of characters open to interpretation. We wanted their appearances and personalities to be striking and memorable, with enough contextual information to offer material for future work.
Our composer, Tom Denman, divided the music into four distinct sections, based upon the storyboards: Tour, Vindict Soldiers, Idra and Joaquim, and Reveal.
“The robot-guided tour of the Public Information Center for Cellarius needed a futuristic Muzak touch that would stay out of the way of the dialogue; however, the mood darkens considerably when the Vindict soldiers appear and enlighten the museum visitors to the contrary side of Cellarius. In addition to a low ominous synth pad, harmonized, distorted and heavily delayed electric guitars add a nice sinister vibe to the horrors described.
The third scene has Idra and Joaquim discussing the use of technology to further the rebels’ cause — a necessary evil, for the time being. This quiet conversation starts with a different, more claustrophobic- sounding tone, and gradually other synths enter to build tension toward the final scene.
To accompany the Reveal, I thought it’d be cool to do something different and
unexpected, so I created a trap beat and jammed along with it on bass guitar until I had a funky riff I liked. Big brass horns provide melodic outer space grandeur, which build up and resolve into the Cellarius audio logo, which I had previously composed for the team.”
The space sequence at the end went through several iterations, and is a separate 3D animation. Originally, our intent was to zoom from the Vindict base out to Mars, then to a Dyson swarm Cellarius was constructing around the sun. But in the end, it felt too disconnected from the rest of the action. When we adapted the scene into the current version, we still found a use for the Dyson swarm and Mars base in the intro monitor sequence. The final step was to animate the background monitors in the tour scene.
The audience at our ETH Denver launch responded well to the video — one member of the audience literally jumped out of his seat at the gunshot moment, to our team’s delight. We are building a different kind of Ethereum platform and product than typically launch at a hackathon, but as a ConsenSys project, we felt it was important to start there and were excited by the enthusiastic reception we got.
Now we are working on our Alpha, during which we will recruit more artists to create their own interpretations of the Cellarius Universe Guide. Maybe the next CX short animation will be yours?
This post was published by Sean O’Connor. If you have questions, connect with him on twitter @aseoconnor
