Temporal Architecture

One of the most complex loops I've built so far. The whole scene is actually made out of one single group of 8 blocks. As they move down the screen they transform into different pieces of architecture. These same 8 blocks are then duplicated throughout the scene, but each set of them is offset in time by 8 seconds. As you move up the screen, each group of blocks is 8 seconds backwards in time, and as you move down the screen, each group of blocks is 8 seconds forward in time. So every 8 seconds, everything is back where it was at the beginning, and the loop is complete. To conceptualize and plan out the construction of this loop, I first created a “scaffolding” out of cubes in Cinema 4D that acted as the base for this kind of looping structure. Then, using a custom AI model that I built by training on years of my past work, I fed a depth pass of the cubes image into Stable Diffusion to generate potential compositions that mimicked my style while staying true to a structure that could be looped using this method. I chose one of these resulting generations as a reference and drew up a plan in Photoshop that divided the image into groups of 8 blocks, which helped me think about how to animate them by showing what each one should look like at each 8-second interval in the animation. Next, every one of these 8 blocks was built in Cinema 4D and animated by hand to transform into four or five different states. And because of the construction of the loop, you visually see all of the states at the same time onscreen and see them transform into each other as they make their way to the bottom of the screen.