Discovering Your Future Self The annual Pause festival is the tech show for creative spirits. Visitors are invited per video clip, and this year's invitation was created by seasoned Cinema 4D artist Brett Morris.

When the Pause festival coordinators commissioned the motion response for this year’s event, ten renowned motion graphics designers from around the world were in the running for its creation. For Brett Morris, the project began with George Hedon’s invitation to be one of these select few who had a chance of getting the nod. After accepting the invitation, Brett was able to let his creativity run free in realizing his vision of what the festival’s theme: Discover your future self.

The team with which Brett wanted to tackle the project included Patrick Goski, a digital sculptor, and Stephen Panicara, designer and animator. Brett and his team gathered visual elements for inspiration, which consisted of three main items: the Marble Canyon, Arizona, cliffs known as ‘The Wave’, a bust and a fluids effect. “During the design phase, a lot of what we had in our mind’s eye was doable but also presented major technical challenges,” remembers Brett. “But we knew from the start that our visual concept had great potential. It quickly became clear that the ‘wave’ formation would have to be constructed in 3D. We wanted to track a shot through the cliffs, which we wanted to depict with a highly stylized structure. We built the assets in Cinema 4D and shaped them using the Sculpt feature.”

The next hurdle the team had to clear was somewhat higher: a wax bust on whose back melting wax had to flow horizontally to form stalagmites. “Here we used a special setup for X-Particles. The first attempt resulted in a monotone look that was much too smooth. Fortunately, X-Particles is a fully integrated plugin and any Cinema 4D tag can be used with it. Simply adding a Jiggle tag gave us the irregular look we wanted for the particles as well as the natural look we had imagined!”

In the next sequence, the bust – which is used as a visual element throughout the motion response clip – had to partially melt and disintegrate into two halves that then rotated to face each other. “We already knew exactly how the melted bust should look but we had no idea how we wanted to create this look,” said Brett. “Fortunately, Patrick – who is also part of the Maxon family – decided to take on the job. He sculpted the melting bust. Since the Sculpt tag saves all sculpting subdivisions, we also had a simplified low-poly version of the model that we could animate. Without this model, the polygon count would have been immense and we would have had to do without the animation,” explains Brett. “Cinema 4D is like a dependable colleague who has your back when things get dicey!”

Looking back, Brett sees this project as something special: “This was a very ambitious project and at the beginning we thought we wouldn’t have enough time to complete the project as imagined. But somehow we were able to realize all the ideas we initially had for the project. In fact, it never really felt like “work” but rather like we were kids playing with our favorite toys – only that our favorite toy now is Cinema 4D!”

Brett Morris website:
www.brettmorris.tv