"The will to shake things up a bit." Visuals + sound by yours truly. As always in my work, I try to put the technical aspects in the background to prioritize emotion and atmosphere. This approach, however, was quite challenging and fun to execute in this piece. I knew I wanted a single shot slowly revealing a city, so using Blender was an obvious choice for the level of control I needed. I enjoy pushing new technologies to see what they can contribute to my process, so I explored how AI could be integrated. I created and generated views of a city, then modeled the buildings, staying close to the AI's suggestions. All the textures were derived from generated images, which I imported to bring life to my buildings using UV mapping. The explosion consists of a simple sphere that gradually expands; I rendered a few passes and processed them through an AnimateDiff model to achieve a gritty texture when brought back into Blender. The character was animated using frame interpolation (such as...