Monday 22 February 2010

Make a demo with 3 simple rules

The other day I was thinking that the continuity of parts and effects in our demos (mostly big demos that go to Assembly and the gathering) can be expressed in 3 very simple terms:

  1. A scene/effect is established on either a plane (quasi-2D) or within a cylinder/sphere (3D). Camera moves accordingly to show the effect.
  2. Planar scenes follow cylindrical scenes and so on.
  3. Long segments of the demo are dedicated to move from one mode to another. This process is called a "transition".
I'll give you an example: in iconoclast there is a scene with a glass-like cube. Camera rotates around (cylinder) -> camera goes inside a door, underwater scene (plane) -> second reality references (cylinder) -> music box, polaroids (plane) -> shark in cube (cylinder) -> final scene and end credits (plane).

Maybe your demo follows a similar pattern too!

1 comment:

  1. I've never written a full demo back to back yet in my particular line of work I've done LOTS of demoish effects.

    I've always thought the best way to do transitions was to render separate scenes onto separate render targets and then transition those to a third target.

    No?

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