Hellbrunn Automatons (2022) #
Directed by Justin Wright & Eric Max Kaplin
Synopsis #
When composer and cellist Justin Wright was diagnosed with cancer, he released an album he had been working on for five years. During his treatments, he teamed up with longtime collaborator, Eric Max Kaplin, to create a music video entirely from the CT scans taken during the diagnostic process. While the images initially served a clinical role for doctors to determine where his cancer had spread, through process of experimentation, they have been reconstituted into looping, pulsing bursts and reconstructed into evolving three dimensional renderings.
Some notes #
In the midst of the pandemic, Justin approached me with this project, which held a special significance due to its connection to his cancer treatment. I taught myself medical imaging and scientific data analysis software to derive a 3D volume from the CT scans. Balancing this project with my regular work at E.D. Films was challenging, yet they were incredibly supportive, allowing me to utilize the render-farm for the demanding 3D shot. This intense rendering task ended up burning out a high-end graphics card overnight. Lesson learned: always render volumetrics separately to avoid overloading the system.
The morphing animation was created using Blender's "Geometry Nodes" features, transforming the extracted 3D volume into a tessellated mesh suitable for lighting and material application.
