Earlier this month I was asked to create a video to compliment an Easter graphics package designed around the theme of “Hills and Valleys”. Graphically, the idea was fairly minimal, with a simple blue/purple gradient behind white text. Below are the original mockups.

With the white silhouette of a mountain, and a blue/purple gradient, I got started on the accompanying animation. The concept was essentially to imagine what the graphic would look and feel like if you could open it and dive inside. What would the rest of this minimal, silhouette world look like? So over the next 5 days, I streamed over 10 hours and 30 minutes of content on Twitch, documenting my process. Below is the condensed version, sped up 20 times and set to music.

It took a lot of testing and experimentation to get the final look of the fly-through animation. Here are a handful of different render tests produced while developing the final look of the animation.

Technical stuff:

• I did not create the print graphics.
• I did not create the music (in the timelapse or the final animation).
• Everything else was created in Blender 2.8 alpha
• I compiled Blender from scratch twice during the project.
• I upgraded GPUs twice during the project (Starting with a basic AMD Radeon and ending with dual Nvidia RTX 2080TIs)
• Streams were handled with OBS.