Story

Initially, the idea was to have a character augmented with a robotic arm wake up inside his capsule and walk out, with the camera tracking backwards as the arm powers up. The camera would then reveal a whole army doing the same.

After some input from the nice people at Side Effects, I decided to have a wide shot of the army waking up first, with a closed capsule in the foreground. We would then cut into the shots of the now hero character waking up like before. Whereas before it would have been a more impersonal story, with the character revealed as only one of the whole army, now the character is implied to be special. My storyboards at this point.

However, after watching some wonderful tutorials on procedural animation, I decided to change the shots a little, with some big implications to the story. I would still keep the wide establishing shot, but replace the shots of the character with a detached robotic arm lying on the floor in front of an open (and empty) capsule. The arm would then start to power up and twitch.

At this point, there would be two possibilities for the story to continue: 1) The short would end, and it would seem the owner of the arm removed it and escaped, or 2) The arm flips itself up, standing on the palm, and looks at the camera. It then becomes clear that the "user" is actually a slave to the arm. However this would look slightly disturbing graphically and might not be approved.

Why did I chose to change my idea again? That's because I knew that procedural animation, and not character animation, would be what I'd rather be doing for 3 months. Granted, the 2nd possibility would need some character work, but it wouldn't be as demanding as animating a humanoid.

My storyboards at this point:

I might also include 2 extra shots, the  first one would be before the arm powers up, and the second one would be before the close up of the arm with liquid flowing through the tubes.

In this shot, these creatures would either light up, one by one, or there would be some form of electricity that would start flowing between them.

 In this shot, the creatures would start flowing/rushing in from the side, and reveal that the arm is actually powered by these little creatures.

We also had a lighting challenge in Houdini today (King's Treasure from 3d Render)! However it was a speed run and I'm too ashamed to post it here.