Dreamrunners

In my freshman year at college, I enrolled in a class called "Biology in Science Fiction," and we could do just about anything for our final project. My friends and I decided to do a movie. But we weren't content to borrow one of the college Handicams, make a rubber alien suit and produce a B-movie. Oh, no.

Although we didn't quite manage to make a complete film in the few weeks we had, we succeeded in making a pretty cool trailer. Even after the class was finished, I remained fascinated with both 3-D animation and the story we wanted to tell. The clip here includes sections I did from our original animation and new footage I've assembled since.

Considering this project was done with only a couple of Macs (originally two 120-MHz 604 Macs, no less) and a couple hundred bucks' worth of software, we did all right. We used Bryce 2 – before Bryce 3D added animation capabilities! – to do the frame-by-frame work, then went to Infini-D in search of a spline modeler. Some of the textures were done in Photoshop, and the logo was done in Illustrator.

The additional footage in the clip above was created using Bryce 3D and Adobe AfterEffects.