LIMINAL CITY

Made between December 2020 and February 2021, this short film shows how I felt living in New York City during the COVID-19 shutdown.

Honestly, I struggled. I know we all did. For me, a big part of it was feeling like I had lost my mojo, my joie de vivre. I had little room in my head for playful, creative thoughts — only worry, and anxiety, and client needs. I’m happy to say that making this film helped me find a little bit of myself again.

Thanks again to John Black / Cypher for this hand-crafted slice of dark audio futurism, and Zack Lovatt for the technical prowess that enabled this whole project to happen in the first place!

BACKSTORY

In early 2020 I worked on a title concept pitch with the always-excellent Hazel Baird at Elastic, for a documentary about online interference in the 2016 election. It didn’t wind up happening, but I really liked the work I proposed and vowed to repurpose it someday for something else.

Here’s a peek at some of those pitch images.

I built these in After Effects, which was nothing short of miraculous. Starting with with one 3D box, I used Essential Properties to adjust the size in all directions, fill it with different media, and stack it vertically with other copies of the same box. But by the time I had a hundred or so boxes in there, the whole project became really difficult and slow to work with. I knew that before I could ever use the idea I would need to iron out some of the technical issues.

Two things happened around Thanksgiving of 2020. For one, something clicked and I realized that I wanted to tell a story about the shutdown, with the city as the main character. Secondly, Zack got involved in the project in the role of technical director, and started the hard work of figuring out the best way to rig these buildings.

Here are the first storyboards that I sketched out in December, once I realized what I wanted to say. As you can see, it evolved a lot over the course of production, but the basic idea was there all along.

Interestingly, Zack proposed that we use the After Effects Beta release to take advantage of the brand new Media Replacement feature for Essential Properties. This was the first time that I’d ever put together a project using the Beta version of AE, but it was worth it. Thanks After Effects development team!

Zack and I went back and forth a number of times trying to get the details of the rig right. In the end he came up with some elegant solutions to my needs, and coded it in a way that didn’t kill me or my computer in the process. He also came up with some snappy names for the precomps.

In the meanwhile I made a few tests with those Zackboxes. One of the biggest challenges for me as a designer was how to imply the scale of the city. How to make the buildings feel big and weighty. Part of the answer to this was adding in very small details, like the tiny dots of light that I set along ‘avenues’. The angle of the camera and the speed of the tracking shots played a big role as well.

I spent a good amount of time working on the geometric patterns on the buildings. In the end, circles and thick stripes felt the best. With the occasional triangle and square thrown in. The background color of the building screens was also a source of experimentation. There had to be a little life back there — something — other than just a black void, otherwise the buildings disappeared into the black background of the shots.

Once I animated this shot, I knew I was ready to stop testing and get to work.

I started animation production on December 22nd, and spent about 4 weeks with my head down cranking out the thirty shots needed to tell this story. This was in some sense the darkest, most difficult time of the pandemic for me. Stuck in my apartment with little sunlight, cold weather outside, and reading news about a violent insurrection in DC — I was honestly grateful to have something to focus on outside of the real world.

The biggest piece of the puzzle finally fit into place once Cypher got involved. John worked with me very patiently to find the right tones for this strange world, and his contributions really make the piece. I absolutely love what he did, and got chills watching it down for the first time with the final mix.

I’m not going to lie and say that I’ve recovered my joie de vivre yet, but I am proud of this short film. I’m happy that my answer to feeling so anxious and unhappy was to make something. To express myself in some way. It was not a conscious choice per se — “hey I feel shitty so let me make something to address my anxieties” — but I’m glad that was my instinct.

CREDITS

Directed, Designed and Animated by Nol Honig
Sound by CYPHER
Technical Direction: Zack Lovatt