Creating the Bcon 2023 Festival Interstitials

Every year, we organize a 'Festival' within the Blender Conference, where the winners receive a Suzanne Award in each category. These are Best Animation, Best Design, Best Short Film and Special Selection that each need an interstitial with titles. We usually develop the style in-house, but this year (2023) we had to develop the interstitials based on branding developed by a studio in Amsterdam.

Development

The Blender Conference 2023 brand was developed by an external studio that handed over all the documents such as logos, fonts, prints and screen images with the characters and more. The meaning behind some of its design was open for interpretation, which allowed me explore more freely.

Interpretation of the theme

The characters are constructed of various household items like a bottle of bleach, a duster, a brush, a paper bag and such. Simple attributes like this gave the characters their name and possible visual interpretation we can use for the interstitials. The patterns on the shirts were the leading inspiration behind the interstitials because of the many ways one can interpret and create visuals with simple shapes. In the end it was mostly a matter of experimenting and getting the timing right between the audio and video.

These are the aforementioned characters.

Visual exploration

With the bleach character, I wanted to experiment with fluidity or a liquid-like movement for the Best Animation category. Using the colors of Bleach’s shirt to animate stripes to transition to simple water like surface. Bleach was used as the first animation test to present to the folks at the studio. After approval of my plans by Francesco, the interstitials were created and iterated upon.

Here is a collection of small bits as a proof of concept, exploring possible ways of creating a full length Interstitial.

The first version of the Best Animation category. The colors need a higher intensity with less complex transitions._

Experiment to add titles between dots using Geometry Nodes.

A reveal slide effect using Geometry Nodes.

Playing with timing and adding titles using a square pattern.

The idea here was to add more dynamic movement to the striped elements. By adding a rigid body simulation, baking the result and animating the last section of the animation we get a loopable result.

The viewport version.

A very playful way of adding a dot. I wasn't sure where this animation would fit but sometimes you have to visualize an idea to know if it has potential.

In the end, the basic premise for these interstitials is a well timed visual with a reveal of the category.

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Creating the interstitials

For the final versions of the interstitials, Andy mentioned: "Ooh it would be great to have these on 60 fps!" and from that point on it was decided to create an extra smooth result and converting existing animations from 30 to 60 frames per second.

Best Animation

For the Best Animation I used the Bleach character and animated the stripes in the shader using an empty. This version is simplified with more emphasis on smaller movement and timing. The colors are also more intense with purple and light-cyan.

Final Best Animation interstitial.

Best Design and Special Selection

This interstitial is my favorite because of the cube/checkered theme. The music also works well with the visuals creating a snappy result.

There are two parts: a cube sliced horizontally with a checker pattern animated towards the camera, and a grid of cubes animated with Geometry Nodes.

The switch from the rotating cube flying towards the camera to the grid of rotating cubes is by removing a white plane, very simple, but it works well.

The Special Selection is a copy with alternative colors.

Best Short Film

Spheres dance around and reveals the title.

The removal of the white background is achieved in Geometry Nodes using a Raycast node and simulated to detect overlap on the plane. The final result is outputted to the material as a mix factor. The spheres at the end are first simulated rigid bodies and baked with adjustments for better composition.

Main Title

For the main title, I wanted to combine multiple patterns/elements of the interstitials and shape them into individual letters. More time is spent on the introduction of the festival title and in this case five different beats, four for every letter and the final presented title.

Drawing this idea helped to picture possible transitions and designs.

Blocking out the scene and camera movement.

It works but it needs some tweaking and cleanup.

The final version used during the festival.

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Sound design and music

All of the sound design and music is created in Ableton Live by using various packs and didgeridoo samples that were recorded. The sound design consisted of various textures and hits to give the overall sound a crisp/snappy feel. The didgeridoo recording had various spoken words, growls, wows, and pops in rapid succession which were later processed with filters and triggered in specific arrangements. Combined with a simple drum kit to determine the base rhythm, the result should have a playful digital character but communicate an established and somewhat raw presence thanks to the didgeridoo.

Have a look/listen at the various (exported) iterations below for each category. The initial version were too heavy on the drums and textures too robotic. Francesco Siddi helped me through the process and we discussed various things we liked and what could be improved.

Take a look at some of the elements and techniques used to create the music. The base elements are the drums, the didgeridoo and additional hits/textures.

The main title track has the most complicated arrangement of triggered didgeridoo samples. It is basically a recording of me playing the didgeridoo and triggering different regions of the recording.

The drums, hits and more are layered together, building up towards the climax of the main title.

The Best Design track with triggered didgeridoo samples including the original recording.

The Best Animation track.

The Best Short Film track.

The Best Design track.

The main title track.

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Final Steps

Text titles

The titles are rendered in the Video Sequence Editor (VSE) by using the same font and colors of the corresponding category, this makes rendering faster and easier.

Example of a title with fake name and production.

Final playlist

For the festival we created a playlist in chronological order and sort the productions by category.

The image above is the actual playlist used during the festival, we add suffixes to each production and introductory titles.

Wrapping up

The process of creating the interstitials took more time due to the longer experimental phase. It was definitely a challenge to create visual material based on the branding identity. There were many ways of interpreting the identity with more visual complexity of the characters, but I chose a simpler route and have more time to experiment by going more abstract.

If you are curious and want to take a look, you can download the blend file here: