Episode 0 starts out with a building hallucination. I wanted these streaks to look kind of 2D and flat with the intention of giving depth to the stars in the next part of the sequence, but these ended up looking pretty 3D after all.

The particle colour gradient was inspired by contemporary Commodore 64 demoscener art (Edge of Disgrace is a good example). It’s not unheard of for C64 artists to use gradations of colour like white-yellow-cyan-green-purple-brown-black – the luma keeps dropping but the chroma skips all over the place on the way. (The Commodore 64 only had 16 colours but even today people are still figuring out novel ways of using them.)

The glow bleed makes it look vaguely old-school optical instead of digital – that’s post-processing with Fog Glow, Blur, Directional Blur set to spin the image and Add nodes to comp it all together.

The minty green, yellow and white sit together well in the same frame and the gentle sparkle and swirl when it’s all animated version is quite pleasant. It’s just not what I want narratively – it’s at least three times too fast, and the impression of depth I don’t care for either. Still, as failed experiments go, it’s a nice one. 🙂