HARD WiRED

Hard Wired is a fully 3D animated short film I created over nine months to explore
the relationship between parents and their children. Throughout my life, I’ve seen in
myself and those around me, cycles of children growing up to become their parents,
inheriting their philosophies, traits, and traumas. When I was five years old, my father
passed away from cancer, and my greatest fear is that I might pass along that same
fate to my children. While life is never promised, what we do with it is up to us. This is
what led me to the central question of Hard Wired: can we change?
I chose to use robots as a visual representation of these cycles, which can often feel
as if coded in our brains or hard wired to our genes. While the world of Hard Wired is full
of robots, the story is that of the human experience and free will. My thesis film is truly
my life story, and where there’s pain and fear, there is also fun and fight.
The visual language of the film supports this sentiment with cyberpunk aesthetics,
flooding dark, grimy environments with bright, neon lights, bringing a gritty texture to the
world and setting the tone that this is a darker story. Hue shifts from golden warmth to
desaturated cold in our character’s home life create the feeling of his familial unit
becoming more emotionally distant. Meanwhile, high contrast, saturated colors, and
atmosphere during fights evoke the idea that fighting is what brings the character life.
The cinematography also aids in the story telling. In the first fight, motion blur sells the
intensity of the fighters’ energy and movements, while the camera rotates around the
fighters to create more dynamic compositions, only to look up at our character when he
wins. Throughout his life’s montage, the camera continues alongside our character
living and fighting from left to right, showing his progression forward. Once in the final
fight, exaggerated perspectives frame the character as a hero, larger than the world
around him, transitioning to looking down on our character as he falls from grace.
Knowledge was power in the creation of Hard Wired. When I began, I had little to no
idea how I was to create the film, the ultimate goal being simply to push myself. I had to
teach myself new techniques, programs, and animation styles to overhaul and optimize
my workflow. Motion capturing my own performances helped to sell the weight and
movements of fights, bringing a far more life-like feel to the characters, all while
speeding up my workflow. Photogrammetry assisted in bringing more props and visual
noise into my environments, adding to the grittiness and texture of the film. The scope
of the project forced me to stay on the cusp of new methods of animation and to utilize
old ones more effectively. Hard Wired made me push myself, and for that, I love it.