Iter: latin, noun, 1) A journey, a course, a path. 

Iter is a student made short film that follows the journey of a rock throughout space and into new worlds.

Credits:
Director / CG Artist/ Editor: Isaac Taracks
Sound: Isaac Taracks & Tristan Barton

Special Thanks:
Aaron Porter
Aaron Covrett
Mike Dollar
Maddie Kroll

These are a some of the photos I had on my inspiration and mood board for this project, I really wanted to go for some cold dark tones with the space scenes and land, but for the crystals I wanted them to either have some pop of color or be pure clear crystals, I went with clear crystals because they fit better in the scenes and weren't as distracting as some of the other test renders I did with the crystals being in color.

- Storyboards

These are the collection of rough storyboards I made to get a feel for what kinds of shots I wanted to have and how those would look in sequence with one another. I originally had around 20 shots, but I narrowed the story and shots down to nine that I felt really had a nice flow to them. 

- Previs

A few still frames from the previs stage of the project. I locked down most of the camera and prop animations in this stage so that the scenes were a) light and easy to change without being bogged down by high poly detailed models and large texture files and b) so that I could do fast software renders out of Cinema 4D and get a feel for the camera movements. 

- Style Frames

These are the many looks that the crystals went through while I was working on this short. The bright pop in color was there as a way to break up the earthy tones I had been using on the planets, rocks, and ground. I ended up going as you can see at the end with a pure white crystal as I felt the pop in color took the crystal out of the world it was put in too much and didn't help the story as much as I had hoped. 

- Scene Builds

These are a few screenshots of the project files, I used EmberGenFX for the smoke simulations in the rock crashing into the planet and crater scenes. In some of the screenshots they show how simple the prop geometry was and how much leaving the details up to normal and height map information worked out. 

- Frame Stills

Here are a few of the best screen grabs form the animation. Most of the shots started with these single camera angles, and then the scene was built around them. This allowed me to not have to build anything outside of the view of the camera, which helped me save time on the modeling and prop making for each scene. 

- Posters