Creating the Building Blocks

When I get the chance to produce music for my animations, I usually make it first. I had a lot of ideas at first and had a lot of fun exploring different sounds. Eventually, I found a guide written by David Engström about mimicking a Nintendo Entertainment System within Ableton. After I created the instruments, I began composing the song. I chose the chord progression by asking myself which progression sounded hopeful and bright.

In my storyboard, I noted that there would be four 3D scenes that featured this pixel going through time. The program I chose for this part of the project was Blender even though I had the option to do it in Maya. I wanted to use this opportunity to teach myself Blender. I kept modeling pretty simple and modeled everything myself to have full control. I then created UV maps to make sure the lighting felt accurate. The last thing I did in each scene was the pixel animation. I found it difficult and time-consuming at first because it was my first time animating a “character” in a 3D space. When I rendered the scenes, I purposefully made the arcade scene the most pixelated, the Gamecube and Playstation 2 scene slightly less pixeled, and the modern console scene the least pixelated. The pixelation is meant to symbolize how hardware and software improved as the pixel progressed through time.

For the fifth and last scene in the animation, I chose to design it in After Effects. This title scene contained the echoes effect and using echoes as color filters that shift as the layers move. Originally, I had the title move from the center bottom to the center of the screen because I thought it would flow better. It didn’t feel right so I went back to my storyboard and made the echoes start where the pixel ends.