Personal Short Film
An exploration of the intangible nature of human experience
Role
Full Production Studio
TOOLS
After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition, Cavalry, Blender, Gaussian splats generated via creative coding
SKILLS
Concept Development, 2D Animation, Procedural Animation, Expressions, Editing, Creative Coding, Archival Media Integration
Taking its name from a philosophical word for the indescribable, immeasurable parts of human experience, this piece, Qualia, is the culmination of 27 years of observations, thoughts, and feelings of what it means to be a human sorting through meaning and interpersonal relationships. Using songs and audio clips that resonated on this topic and visuals are made up of stylized home videos and photos, this attempts to illustrate how the human brain falls short of being able to understand the lived experience of another.
Gaussian Splat Creative Coding
For a section of the film, I knew I wanted to play with the intended use of Gaussian splats and feel as if I was breaking pieces of my life down to the smallest form. With only still images and short videos for content, I ran into issues where the Gaussian splat tools I could find needed long videos or many, many images, so I turned to LLMs to try procedural creative coding for the first time.
I used Gemini to help me build a Colab notebook to extract Gaussian splats from single images and short videos. My only requirements of the output were some level of depth in the resulting .ply file and retained color information.
After I brought those into Blender, they were already significantly abstracted, but I set up keyframeable sockets in geometry nodes to animate splat rotation and scale. After rendering out a camera path through the distorted splats, I brought it into AE added color and effects, and exported the last segment to put into Cavalry's image sampler and further break down the visuals into pieces.