LA Film Studio NFTs
Still from one of the animations done for this project: Electromagnetism.
Over the past few months I had been commissioned to create some animations for a studio in Beverley Hills, California. This was quite an exciting project for me as it was the first time working with a studio with tithes to the film industry. EMP (Electromagnetic Productions) is a film & tv production studio founded by Roger Birnbaum & Mark Kimsey. They planned to launch EMP with the creation of 4 NFTs & a 5th NFT to be released after their initial launch. My task was to create the animations that would become the NFTs.
Concept
The main concept behind the 4 NFTs was based around the idea of the 4 fundamental forces of the nature:
Gravity
Electromagnetism
Strong Nuclear Force
Weak Nuclear Force
Methodology
The methods I went about to produce these were by using particle systems within 3D software. The tricky part of this was to imitate the general shape of what we envision these fundamental forces to appear like through the parameters of the virtual particle simulations.
What are particles systems?
A particle system is a technique seen across many different motion graphics & game engine software that essentially emits a collection of 1-dimensional points into the 3D space. The emission points can be defined by the user into various shapes so that the emission can be placed along shapes, patterns and animated positions. Various 2D sprites or 3D objects can be applied to each particle that gets emitted, allowing the creator to define how their particles will appear in the final render (e.g. a collection of spheres to make a simple snowball particle system).
Example of a basic particle system. Points being emitted from a single point.
Shaping the particle systems
Using the ‘Gravity’ force as an example, I aimed to replicate the same form seen in many diagrammatic interpretations of gravity. This was in the form of the vortex-like shape that is often seen in depictions of space-time. The particles themselves would therefore flow along a curve in the shape of this downward-spiral. This was then duplicated & rotated around the central point and then we eventually see the circular vortex pattern with particles flowing along the form of ‘Gravity’.
Particle Appearance
I decided to make each particle a small low-poly 3D form. This was to keep the required processing power of the simulation to a minimum whilst rendering out each frame of the animation. As many of these particle systems were using around 1 million particles, the program could often reach its limitations especially if the chosen particle was of a larger polycount, therefore less faces = faster simulation.
For the material of the particle, I created an emissive metallic material which used pink to blue colour gradient. This would result in each particle emitting a coloured light source. This would lead to interesting visual effects and gave the distinguished appearance of the 4 NFTs in this collection.
Launch
The project seemed to be well received and had a successful launch. The 4 NFTs were sold out in both drops and hopefully the users will be able to continue to use them in the future. Owning these NFTs gives the users extra utility by being able to be a part of future EMP projects. These were sold on the Eluv.io marketplace.
This was a fun project to undertake that tested my skills with particle systems. It was a great opportunity to work with EMP and look forward to more interesting projects in the future.