Trailer for "Epicycle"

[Rusty Bolt]

Epicycle Trailer

Teaser of animated stills from the surreal short "Epicycle", a film by Deb Ethier with music and sound design by Ewan Laker-Mansfield.

vimeo.com

This is from a recent project. I did this trailer a little differently than usual - I used stills from the film with overlays of some of the animated elements. It just gives a little taste of the aesthetics of the film itself without giving much away. There's also a snippet of the sound design so watch with sound up!
The actual film is doing really well on the festival circuit so far, surpassing my expectations...that's always nice!

(I think the film itself comes up next on Vimeo after the trailer...it's about 7 minutes long)

 

[Nate North]

Looks cool! I personally like surrealist animation. I'll watch the whole film later when I get a minute free. Thanks for sharing it. Trailer is interesting.

 

[Nate North]

Ok, I watched the full film.

Great Stuff. It kind of feels like the perfect art film, thematically and in terms of execution. I particularly liked how you freely mixed effects and techniques from a number of different programs, kind of putting visual coherency on the back burner and just exploring the possibilities without the limitations. If that comes off as some kind of backhanded compliment, it's not, I totally get everything you've done here, and appreciate that you're able to have fun and think freely within the medium while relying on the core theme, and elements like rhythm and color to unify the film in a way that feels focused and eclectic simultaneously I think a lot of that AE stuff will really appeal to the lifer animators at the festivals (we've all used CC Lens, lol), and for an art film, you really can't pick a better subject than patterns of existence over time.

Wow, that sounded pretentious. But, whatever, that's my honest take on it.

 

[Rusty Bolt]

Thanks so much for watching and commenting, Nate. As you suspected, I was going for a bit of a juxtaposition of techniques without being jarring; ties into the theme a bit, I guess. And yes...it's an art film so I guess that's allowed, lol! And now for a really dumb question - I don't use AE so what is CC Lens?

 

[Nate North]

Oh, it's a common effect that everyone uses, it comes bundled in with AE, the default tool for many animators from the 90s-2020 or so. CC lens is a type of simple optics compensation effect that creates gradient distortion around a circular frame. There are a lot of tools that do something very similar, I just assumed that's what you used for those round window effects, because it's the ubiquitous tool for that task. Sorry for the confusion. There's a "CC lens" under one name or another in virtually every major editing program, and they all look pretty much the same in practice.

 

[Rusty Bolt]

I particularly liked how you freely mixed effects and techniques from a number of different programs, kind of putting visual coherency on the back burner and just exploring the possibilities without the limitations.

I do have to be honest, though - the only overtly 2D parts are the layered coloured gear backgrounds...pretty much everything else was done in Blender. I did the backgrounds that way specifically to act as a graphic foil to the rest.

 

[Rusty Bolt]

Oh, it's a common effect that everyone uses, it comes bundled in with AE, the default tool for many animators from the 90s-2020 or so. CC lens is a type of simple optics compensation effect that creates gradient distortion around a circular frame. There are a lot of tools that do something very similar, I just assumed that's what you used for those round window effects, because it's the ubiquitous tool for that task. Sorry for the confusion. There's a "CC lens" under one name or another in virtually every major editing program, and they all look pretty much the same in practice.

Ah - yes, there was a lens distort used in the "cave" scenes. Other than that, blurred masks and vignettes did the trick.

 

[Nate North]

So you did the multi window sections in native 3d? Interesting. I just assumed you were doing some compositing in 2d, just to lighten the workload. Not suggesting you get into AE at this point, there are better alternatives now, but just FYI, you can do some really in depth stuff with AE, and now several other 2d editing programs. Node based setups, expressions, even real time 3d inside a 2d footage editor. You're already past the need for that stuff though, it's typically a stepping stone to stuff like blender. A lot of us still use it for some things, distortion effects for example, because it's much faster than a 3d program for simpler applications, and because a lot of old school animators like myself spent years in AE before graduating to stuff like Max and Maya, and later on Blender, once it caught up with and eventually surpassed it's predecessors.

These days, you can do about anything in blender. I'm sure you know all about it, but it was not so long ago when Blender didn't have much in the way of 2D capabilities. Stuff like EEvee, really changed the game for creators on a budget. I was just about to get into Grease pencil, when we transitioned over to UE5, for a variety of reasons.

Anyway, I really did like the film, beyond the animation itself, there were just a lot of good concepts in there, like the chessboards, the leaves, etc. I expect it will do well at the festivals!

 

[Rusty Bolt]

Sorry - I misunderstood. I meant all the animation, scenes and setup was done in 3D (Blender) except the gear backgrounds. Stuff like the broken-up scene, layering etc., was all done in post...all I did was make dupes of the render and cut up the dupes (old school paste and scissors, lol).

Thanks again - so glad you liked it! I really enjoyed creating it. It's already had some success in the fest run (going with a lot of experimental fests this time)..