WITHOUT YOU

§ Project Description

“Without You" is an animated short about human greed. Ants peacefully inhabit their world, until humans invade, determined to harvest their powerful mushrooms as an energy source. When humanity destroys the earth, the ants discover a way to get rid of the humans. The Project We wanted to create a stylized film that humerously takes up the topic of human greed, in combination with climate change and take the persepective of ants. The Look was highly inspired by the Game "Grounded".

§ Process

After facing a major setback at the start of production and requiring to start nearly from scratch, we worked hard to achieve our goal of delivering a finished product. The story is now much better conveyed, thanks to Josef Schinwald`s assistance in constructing an epic adventure for our protagonist.

§ My Role

For the second Bachelor Project, unlike the first one, we were working as a team. Some students who had done particularly well in the first project were given the opportunity to take on a Lead position. In this project, I was given that responsibility, which meant guiding my teammates and helping to organize the workflow. I wanted to make sure that nobody felt overwhelmed, so I assigned specific roles to my peers and took on the remaining tasks myself. Midway through, the project was completely restructured, which made the semester very challenging for all of us.

In the end, my main responsibilities included:
○ Project Management
○ Feedback & Tutoring
○ Compositing
○ Animation / Layout / Rendering / Lighting / Simulations
○ A bit of Modeling & Texturing (with most of it handled by Bernadette Erkinger)
○ Communication with Audio / Voice actor
○ Singing with my beautiful voice for the credits :)

It was certainly a lot of work, but I learned how important it is to balance leadership with collaboration. Even though the scope of the project was ambitious, everyone contributed in their own way, and I focused on keeping things moving forward so the team could finish successfully.

§ Learnings

Project Management

○ First time managing a Project
○ Giving constructive Feedback ○ Filestructures are Important

3D

○ First Houdini Destruction Simulation
○ Working in a Team to bring all assets together into a final scene