Rooms with a view

March 20, 2022 3:00 AM

"During February 2022, I challenged 3D artists with the Infinite Journeys 3D challenge, where I provided artists with a simple animation of a moving "vehicle" and they built out their own customs scenes. Of the 2,448 entires, the top 100 were chosen for this montage"

Earlier challenges:

https://www.metafilter.com/191818/100-x-3-second-3D-Renders
https://www.metafilter.com/192416/Ball-drop

posted by Gyan (15 comments total)

Ridiculous amount of talent, atmospheres, concepts. Gets your story-processing brain going overtime! I kept worrying I was missing all the thoughtful details the artists included. Might I recommend a playback speed of 0.75? The track still sounds dope and the little details are all catchable.
posted by BlunderingArtist at 3:13 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Very well done, it creates a nice surreal, fantastical effect. Love the variety of styles, something you could only get with a collaborative piece, no production company could ever put so much creative-effort-per-second into a video.
posted by mokey at 3:22 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Utterly mind boggling incredible! When an artist filmmaker finds a way to coordinate his vision with this world community of talent it'll put the disneys and pixars out of business.
posted by sammyo at 5:29 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I love these. The previous one was a figure dragging/pulling something. Such a great variety!

Two suggestions, though: I want to see the original "framework" that every animator worked with. I wonder just how simple it is. Secondly, three seconds is just too short. I get it that you get more animations that way, but it's just a little too jarring to cut to something else so quickly. How about six seconds? That way my eyes and brain have a little recovery time.
posted by zardoz at 5:37 AM on March 20, 2022 [3 favorites]

The original challenge is here. Watch from 5:59 to 7:16 for the setup and rules. He shows the Blender model that is the basis for the submissions (and you can download it); it's pretty darn simple.
posted by zompist at 6:19 AM on March 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

takes some amount of chutzpah to get 100 other people to submit free work, concatenate it, and give yourself the by-line
posted by logicpunk at 7:02 AM on March 20, 2022 [4 favorites]

Seems to me it’s roughly the same amount of chutzpah as being so devoted to your art that you want it be seen by as many people as possible. Most of the creative types that I know have, at some point, happily created, collaborated, and disseminated their work for the sheer joy of belonging to a community of similarly passionate people. I’ve done it (not this project, to be clear). It was an honor and a privilege to play a part in bringing something awesome into being. YMMV
posted by barrett caulk at 7:16 AM on March 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

That was wonderful! So many of them almost encapsulated a whole story just in one scene, which takes incredible talent. And so many included tiny special extra things happening at the edges of the frame - I'll be doing multiple rewatches.

takes some amount of chutzpah to get 100 other people to submit free work, concatenate it, and give yourself the by-line

I hear you, and I agree that the framing of it under his own name is pretty discomfiting, but every scene has its animator credited. As someone who uses animators from time to time I definitely see this as a resource pointing me to people whose work I'd never see. I recently watched this fun ball pass compilation video which was less self-serving from its initiator, but I found took more work to track down individual contributors who were only credited at the end in blocks.
posted by Mchelly at 7:18 AM on March 20, 2022 [2 favorites]

There's nothing stopping any of these artists from taking the challenge and posting their work to their own YouTube channel instead of submitting it to be in his compilation video.
posted by straight at 9:26 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

i think there'd be an audience for a reel of all 2.5K submissions in random order. At about 4 hours long you could get in quite a few bong rips.
posted by seanmpuckett at 10:52 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

That will be published next week.
posted by Gyan at 11:05 AM on March 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is it really "chutzpah" to organize an international design challenge, provide a few prizes, answer questions and support via Discord, and collect, judge, collate, credit and make visible all the ~2400 submissions, and then "attach his name" to the project? It's not like he's taking credit for the submissions, stealing their IP, offering the challenge under false pretenses or adding the works as unpaid art in a previously-unmentioned game or movie. I find it amazing that some folks think one must host a collaborative creative effort completely anonymously.
posted by Dez at 10:27 AM on March 22, 2022

it were a mild observation. i would have expected something more along the lines of 'edited by' like they do with anthologies. the 'By' on its own implies a level of authorship i don't think is warranted just because he went to the effort to '...organize an international design challenge, provide a few prizes, answer questions and support via Discord, and collect, judge, collate, credit and make visible all the ~2400 submissions...'

so yeah: it takes some amount of chutzpah to equate a mostly administrative role with a creative role.
posted by logicpunk at 12:33 PM on March 22, 2022

Oh, hey, it's Clint, formerly of Corridor Crew's VFX Artists React, a personal favorite for pandemic binge-watching!
posted by Gable Oak at 10:12 AM on March 23, 2022

That will be published next week.

Here you go!
posted by Rash at 12:46 PM on March 26, 2022 [1 favorite]