The content of the movie is somewhat hard to explain, so I'll let you work it out for yourselves:

Edit: I'm throwing in Elwins writeup too:
WHAT THE STORY LINE IS:
This animation is a journey through time from a dark water pump shaft that was once a ceremonial site with great spiritual significance to the aboriginal people and their DREAMTIME. To the colonial homestead elements that emulate the pioneers' struggle in a harsh alien land. It symbolizes growth and strength and beauty of nature and culture that is often controlled and threatened by civilization and man-made machines, that serve a very strong purpose in the survival of imperialism, white supremacy and the domination and destruction of ancient culture.

WHERE THE STORY TRAVELS:
The journey moves through three environments. Firstly, the cave or shaft as we know it. Secondly, the windmill that is the harsh steel mechanical element that controls and threatens. Thirdly, the last elements of sun and earth that show us the result of where and how the bud exists.

WHY:
We have been through a process of exchanging three ideas each and then formulating one from these possibilities. We arrived at this story and believe it suits the criteria in the assignment.




The different environments are in different stages of production, everything from final render to adding the last touches to the modeling. Here are some samples:




The environment is temporary.


Got a 10 sec animation of this, but couldn't fit it on the server.

Finally, an animated flag.

As you might notice, the windmill is completely missing from the collection. The modeling is almost done and we'll put it up when we feel we have a nice rendering.

Dude! Nice! Your making us look bad .
Let me gues. Vray?

Thanks It's all Scanline actually. Chose it for its simplicity

Did some work on the windmill today. Textures are temporary. Lighting is done to match the outback landscape. I know the sky is too blue. Modeling isn't quite complete yet, but we're getting there









C&C appreciated

Nice modell. I also think the sky color is nice, but that greyish clouds (?) doesn't look to good. If it's supposed to be dust it looks to smoke-ish.

Looking forward to see this one if I ever get the chance. Only thing is it will probably make mine look bad when compered.

Video updates today. Stuff looks a bit bleak due to too heavy compression. Had to do it to fit it on my server though.

Earth. The lighting is wrong here. I left a few on that should have been off. Edit: Fixed.

Flag. Might be the final render.

Windmill. All the mechanics are working. Now we just need textures.

Sweet!
is this for the raid assignment?
are you doing groupwork?
I think the sky color is kind of polluted; like you have a picture of a sky and then put a grey overlay layer ontop of it in PS...
If this is Scanline and you are 3DDA students I am really impressed, (not that I'm not if your not:P,) and may I ask you about the rendertime?
As for videocompression, why not QuickTime with Sorenson Video 3 codec?

amazing.. nice job so far good luck!

Thanks for the comments . Should be ready to render this thing soon. Need to adjust some textures and add leaves to the growing vine. The leaves themselves are made and I've tested how to put them on a moving object in another scene, so it's just a matter of putting it all together. Last WIP inside the shaft:



The windmill added to the landscape:


Cave Paintings:


mju:
Yeah, it's for the ride assignment. We're working in groups of two. I know the sky is a bit bleak. Will fix it if we've got time (it's just a gradient ramp). And yeah, this is Scanline and 3DDA Render times varies a lot. From 0.5sec on the earth to over a minute inside the shaft, looking up. The landscape is about 40 sec/frame, so we need to finish up soon and fire up the "renderfarm" (two computers and a string) to be done on time. Or we may have to do some optimization. As to the codec, we use Sorenson 3 internally, but as my webhosting package doesn't include a whole lot of space, I'm using mp4 compression on the WIP videos we put up.

Looks very nice. Will be coll to see your animations. When do you think it will be done (deadline?)?

Just wondered. How did you make the "grass" inside the shack and on the "Badlands" scene? Terrain?

Deadline is on wednesday. Hoping to start rendering the main sequence tonight. Estimated rendering time is ~45 hours on one computer. We'll use two though.

Each straw of grass is a plane with 1x1x4 segments in the shape of a straw. I created 5 different ones, and gave them 5 different textures. Then I used Scatter under Compound objects to scatter them across a surface. It'll scatter on any geometry. Having created "clumps" of grass, I placed them manually in the shaft, which frankly wasn't much fun. On the landscape I used particle flow with the landscape as emitter and a bitmap to define the what areas should be grassy. Every clump of grass contains 125 straws and on on the landscape, there are 2000 clumps. Inside the shaft, there are around 100. Looking back, I might have used Hair&Fur as this method is a bit heavy, but that's too late for this project

This is excellent! I can hardly wait to see this wonder in motion!
The only crit I can think of is that some of the rocks closest to the camera in the landscape scene could do with a wee bit more segments.

Rendering is complete and the music isn't far from finished.

Still trimming it here and there, but if you want an early look you can head over here.

Mmmmmm... eyecandy very good work!! if there is anything i want to crit, it has to be the camera movement as the seed grows, a little bit too focused on the seed maybe.. but probably not worth re-render, that looks heavy how long did the render take?

Thanks We're aware of the camera being a bit weird in places, we'll see if we'll rerender parts of it. It's a bit heavy though, as you said. I don't have an exact number as it was rendered using BackBurner and in 4 different shots, but the whole movie took probably close to 20 hours on one core2duo 2.6GHz and one core2duo 2.0GHz, both with two gigs of ram.

Amazing stuff!
I love the symbolism in this film.
And of course the beautiful renders!

Thanks a lot Andreas

People might have noticed that all the images and videos have disappeared recently. A shame really, as the movie is now complete. The reason for this is that my web hosting provider went about upgrading my site today from 150 MB of space to whopping 600 MB, and as a side effect, 20 gigs of bandwidth instead of 10. All free of charge, which is rather good, but in their haste to improve my website, they most likely entered 2 gigs of bandwidth and not 20. I've already used 3 gigs this month, so now my website is closed. Good thing that they respond fairly quickly to email, so with any luck, things should be back to normal from tomorrow morning

Jesus Fu*k, Michael! Both the technical side and the creative bit is insanely good. I mean really, how can anyone top this?

Thanks

My web server is up and running again, so here is the final movie

DVD:

Congratulations, this project awesome! Not many ride films give the audience more than just a ride... but this one does! Great!

I got my bachelor degree in Australia and the whole time I was there I saw maybe 3-4 Aboriginals.. Almost like they are extincted. Very sad indeed!

Anyways..
It's great that you are posting this on the forum. This is very good inspiration for everyone.

Some thoughts (pirkepirk):
- The Cola bottle looks very big compared to the pots.
- I think a litlle more anticipation before the plant start to grow could prepare the audience better for what is about to happen. (Maybe a drop of water falling from the sky, landing in the pot just before it starts to grow)
- The globe looks great, but I think it spins way too fast.
- As Hovland mentioned.. the cam is a bit too focused on the flower and the motion of both the camera and the rose climbing is a little chaotic.

Just minor things.. as I said, this project is awesome!

I hope everyone tries to make a nice cover and such like you did. It makes the project look alot more professional and presentable.

Can you give us an estimate on how many hours you have spent on this?
Did anything go wrong along the way? Solutions?