I had no written narrative to follow when I first started this animation – instead the story evolved as I began putting together the different shots. ‘Alone’ tells the story of a fictitious character in the form of a sphere, being dropped into a mysterious world where it rolls around before discovering a collection of buildings. As it explores these, the character stumbles across another ‘being’ like itself. The two join together to explore the new world until finally reaching the edge of a void. As it peers over the edge, the first character is betrayed by its companion and kicked into the void where it falls downwards to whence its journey began.

‘Alone’ was my first attempt at 3D animation using software and considering I had little prior knowledge or formal training and was largely self taught, I am pleased with the outcome. I recognise the imperfections with this film, with its various broken shots from camera work to animation. I had considerable time limitations, as the brief for the project was to produce a stop motion animation rather than 3D. In addition, the rendering of 64 samples on an old graphics card took between 2 – 8 minutes per frame. Despite the painstaking work involved, I was keen to explore the medium and this proved an ideal project to do so.

In the making of ‘Alone’, I had only a basic knowledge and understanding of texturing, UV maps, modelling, rigging and certain other techniques. Through the project I developed my knowledge of lighting, key frame animation, rendering and realised the importance of planning. Without an initial written script to follow, I found it considerably time-consuming creating ideas and sequence of events before animating, filming and rendering them. I often left the linking shots until later. Modelling was simple geometry, and I used a few facial adjustments to make the 2 characters recognisably different. The building were a free asset that I downloaded and then textured and coloured. The final image was put out by the renderer with no colour correction, editing or boca.

This was fully produced by me, other than the building models.