Created in Cinema 4D, and After Effects, for the purpose of an experimental Exquisite Corpse Project I was doing with several other friends. (In short, each week you complete an expressive piece of any artistic format, and pass it to the next person, who makes their own piece in response to what they’ve recieved, and so forth.) I was hungering to make something both beautiful and haunting, absolutely abstract with its imagery and representation. Shapes, color, sound, and some Xpresso in C4D would be the path to achieving this.

I was working with some limited hardware, as well as limited time to execute the project (but really, when is ever not limited time?), and needed to create a system for efficient rendering and iteration. My vision required extensive use of depth of field and rack focusing, as wells a overexposed specularity, both which are very processor-intensive if done natively through Cinema 4D. I’d need a workaround. In otherwords, fake. that. shiz.

I settled on an effective solution by rendering in Cinema 4D in a multi-pass series, with separate specular and depth fields. I’d take the different plates/passes and composite them into After Effects. The depth pass I’d plug into Frischluft, (which does very powerful lifting with depth maps at a mere fraction of the processor time that C4D can.) which enabled me to actually iterate depth of field control without having to pull my hair out.

Specular passes gave me full control on overexposed glow, to really dial in the grimey, Super 8, projected-science-class-educational-video feel I was going for.

Here you can see the different passes and how they muster up together. Your basic color pass looks like bland garbage, but then once you lay your different effects plates/passes in, the visuals really have life to them.