I wanted to do a simple abstract animation to test my DVD production capabilities, and I started off with an idea for dancing cubes. Things evolved until I hit upon the phrase "uniformity breeds weakness" at which point I had a theme and was able to restructure the elements within that context. With the central theme in mind, making decisions about the style of animation became much easier, such as giving the cubes a drab and sterile look to emphasize their lack of uniqueness. My thinking behind arranging the music was similar, like the oppressive opening beat which I felt helped hammer home the rigid conformity of the cloned cubes. While the animation is simple, I think it readily conveys the theme and intent I had in designing it, and it was certainly fun to make.
A variety of software went into creating this video including 3D Studio Max, Vegas Video, Acid, Corel Photo-Paint, and others. It marks my first animation done in Max 5.1, which has been lots of fun to work with; it's also true that without the amazing software from Discreet and Sonic Foundry this project would never have happened.
Since I was going for a simple abstract piece I skipped storyboards once I had a very brief "script" in hand to describe roughly what I was going for and the sequence of events to get there. Modeling and most of the materials, which were all quite simple, were kept parametric and made keyframing fairly painless, except where instancing of the cubes had to be broken down. The vector, an agent of disease, needed to be a little on the disgusting side so ripples and other distortions were added, along with a mottled and sort of wet material.
For those curious about resolution and aspect ratios, the final animation was rendered in Max to frames at 873x480 (going for an image aspect of 1.8181 and a pixel aspect of 1.0), then rendered in Vegas to DVD MPEG2 video at 720x480 (shooting for a pixel aspect of 1.2121). This allowed me to burn anamorphic widescreen video to DVD using Sonic Foundry's DVD Architect and my Pioneer A05 drive. I could have rendered the video at 720x480 with a pixel aspect of 1.2121 from Max, but I chose to use a pixel aspect of 1.0 originally in order maintain standard shaped pixels and keep things simple for post production (no funky scaling of pixel-based effects required). I'm quite pleased with the look of the results on DVD.