Bicolor Challenge by LJ
BICOLOR-CHALLENGE Released at: Deadline 2024 Visuals: LJ Music: wayfinder Special Thanks: NR4 Notes: The rules of the challenge were simple, use the given soundtrack by wayfinder and only use two colors of your choice throughout the whole prod. This was a fast challenge during the party hence the syncs are sloppy, the performance sucks and it's too big. None of that takes away the fun I had trying to come up with ideas to play with the concept! So after the obligatory no sleep grind on my 4k, during which I redirected the whole intro, I seamlessly switched to the challenge around 10:00 in the morning. I thought the obvious choice would be to play with transitions from negative to positive space and back, which is why I didn't want to lean on that too much (thinking others would already do this a lot). I knew a certain other competitor (who ended up not making it) had their dithering game up at 11 so I didn't want to try to compete on that level, instead I looked into fun, artistic, simply different ways to dither. First I used grid/cell like dithering which looked like a dynamically subdivided quadtree, pretty neat. Eventually playing with different colors, sizes and orientations I figured why not try different cell shapes and eventually collapsed my cells to 1D. I liked the look of it and figured I'd change the dithering strategy thorughout the intro, that'd be its thing, however when I started working on the contents I quickly realized that the raymarching would need to take a backseat because it proved tricky to build scenes that worked well with the limited amount of (dithered) shades and time I had at my disposal. At first I had a matrix green on black color-scheme, thinking I'd go into a wireframy, old-terminal rendering look, quickly thereafter I changed it to a graphite black on craft-paper white as that was more pleasing and implied an underlying organic substrate tying into my opening visuals (ink-blobs on canvas). There's not much to say in regards to how the content of the intro came together, I just moved from one idea to the next, having the previous content, the color-scheme and its implied organic substrate as well as the music guide me. The first half flowed pretty well, then the second half became more and more difficult due to the fact that I was awake for god-knows how many hours at this point. Eventually the last shot with the LJ ribbons took like 2 hours and the closing rectangular vigniette alone like 10 minutes, just so you get an idea of how fried my brain was at that point. When all was shaded and done, I luckily could rely on NR4 to help me over the finish line by guiding me how to compile the sointu yaml track so I could get it into my framework and also debug the last few issues I was facing with the shader-minifier struggeling to parse the array syntax (but not giving a very helpful error message) I was using. - LJ
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