Nov 8, 2017

Exclusive Premiere: "Plant Room," a 360 short film by Jeron Braxton and Julian Grander

Jeron Braxton and Julian Granda are illustrators, designers, 3D animators, and filmmakers whose low-poly, glitchy art is often inspired by Internet and video game culture and dives into the realm of everyday technology.

The two recently collaborated on an experimental 360 CG short called Plant Room. The short features four different virtual environments filled with modern, organic life, allowing the viewer to explore the areas or simply look at what is in front of them.

Cartoon Brew premieres "Plant Room" here and also hears from Braxton and Granda themselves about how and why it was made. (Braxton's short film "Glucose" recently premiered as part of Cartoon Brew's CB Fest season.) [Braxton and Grander first met at SXSW this year. Braxton and Grander first met at this year's SXSW. I think we started talking about this idea within five minutes of meeting," Granda told Cartoon Brew. [On the last night of the festival, Julian emailed me a file titled 'plant room. We felt our styles meshed well together, and it started out as an aesthetic creation. But over time, it blossomed into a substantial conceptual piece about our lives as they relate to nature and technology"

. [Indeed, "Plant Room" travels through four life stages, each illustrating how technology can dominate. Beginning with the pristine natural environment, it eventually "evolves into something psychotic and techno-mainframe-like," as Grander describes it.

The short was initially intended as a traditional narrative piece, but the duo wanted to experiment with immersive content. Using the open-source Blender software, the environments, props, and characters in "Plant Room" were created in 3D by Granda and Braxton. When the decision was made to turn the work into a 360-degree video, Braxton noted that the project files and environments needed to be revisited and updated to make more sense in that space

.

"There are a lot of shortcuts that can be avoided in regular video that don't work in 360," Braxton said.

"We had to work almost like a video game developer in designing the environment, because we had to make sense of every angle.

One challenge, one that all VR and 360-degree filmmakers face, is that viewers can see almost everywhere. Filmmakers partially addressed this issue by creating generative, procedural effects to fill scenes and relying on default camera placement.

"When an experience begins looking in a particular direction, the viewer understands that's where the focus is. Motion is another trick." When the camera is moving in a certain direction, we instinctively look in that direction because we want to "stay on track." I also think it helps that 'The Plant Room' moves fairly slowly and is not particularly focused on the narrative."

In addition to being a way to further explore their favorite themes of "technology" and "digital life," "Plant Room" was also, Braxton and Granda say, an opportunity to learn more about collaboration. [21][22] "It was the first time I had collaborated with another animator," Braxton said. This collaboration opened my eyes to a whole new way of animating." This collaboration felt like we were doing the Dragon Ball Z fusion dance and creating a dope video that combined both styles in a whole new and powerful format. Teamwork definitely makes dreams come true and this is the beginning of something beautiful."