- Director
- Nicole Perlman
- Production Company
- Even/Odd
The Slows is a short film directed by Nicole Perlman, a writer known for Guardians of the Galaxy. The film is set in a future where childhood is artificially skipped to help repopulate Earth.
I created this opening shot of cells rapidly multiplying. The director wanted the cells to behave in a somewhat unnatural and grid-like way, ultimately forming something in between an organic and geometric structure. I used Houdini's VEX to start with a single point, check whether surrounding positions were occupied by another point, if not (and with a degree of randomness) generate a point and move it to that free position. I instanced metaballs to these points to resemble cell mitosis, adjusting their size (and other attributes for rendering) throughout the splitting process.
To have the cells form the structure they do I constrained their options to be within a growing L-system, finally rendering using Arnold.
I had two weeks from start to finish to create this shot, below are some the experiments I did which led to the final look.