Entanglements - Journey of Light

This project explores the journey of light from our Sun as it travels through and interacts with the Earth's atmosphere, revealing the complex natural interactions between particles, matter, and light that often go unnoticed in our daily lives. Despite the commonality of phenomena such as blue or orange skies, the underlying physical mechanisms remain abstract and complex, challenging our understanding of light's behavior.

Before I started working on this project, I kind of knew why the sky was blue or why it wasn't, and like pretty much everything in science, we understand these phenomena using man-made models and after diving relatively deep into the different types of models, I realised more and more that light is still too abstract for us to really have a one-size-fits-all explanation for this case.

Storyboard + Moodboard & Inspirations

I used a lot of Nasa imagery and films that came to mind as reference (Sunshine, 2001, Interstellar, Voyage of Time/Tree of Life,…).
My original plan for the visuals would have included more microscopic models of atoms/light and a re-creation of eyes, nerves and the visual cortex, which was sadly beyond the scope of this course and its timeframe.

I liked the visual parallels between the eye, the sun, the solar system and the classical model for atoms, and I had originally planned to use the first scene of the solar system as a kind of atom/molecule visualisation.

Visuals

One aspect I really wanted to focus on was the visual integrity of the project, and that it was as simple as possible, not drowning the viewer in flashy imagery.

I knew I wanted to animate everything myself because I had done a lot of space renderings before, but one thing that was different this time was that I was using Blender exclusively.

With the 4.0 update on the Horizen I wanted to switch from Cinema4D to Blender full time for various reasons and this was the perfect opportunity to do so.

Conclusion

With this project, I wanted to make the subject as easy to understand as possible, but in order to really understand the layers underneath, you would have to go into at least some diagrams and formulas, and I didn't really know how best to incorporate that into the visuals or the interactive graphs.

One thing I felt everyone struggled with was the software provided for the interactive graphs. I found myself getting annoyed with it almost every time I tried to use it.
Sometimes things wouldn't load or save properly, or nodes would jump out of the canvas boundaries never to be seen again. I also felt a little constrained by the workflow, as it was a little too inflexible for what I wanted to do in certain places, and without an alternative I was rather unmotivated to flesh out the graph.

But I think it already has a lot of potential and I am sure it is already a valuable tool for many educational purposes.

Overall, I really enjoyed the workshop and felt satisfied with the way my project turned out. And if there are any future workshops with a similar focus, I would highly recommend them.