Trash is a learning project disguised as an animated short created by myself and my friend, Alex Laurant. It's a simple digital vignette that examines the occasional monotony and drudgery that people sometimes feel on the job. In the case of Trash, we follow Frizzo during one of his shifts at Ubersmelt Industries.

Alex is a talented Art Director and concept artist with a rich history in visual FX for film and more recently video games and real-time technology. I have a background in animation for live action feature films along with video editing and filmmaking in the real-time space.

The project started out as a “holographic diversion” over 7 years ago when Alex and I were working on Microsoft's Hololens development. It was meant to serve as an after-hours learning project for the use real-time technologies in linear narratives. We had experience with content creation software like Photoshop, Maya and Premiere, but less so with game engines. Trash was a way for us to both create something and learn.

Over the past few years I’ve rebuilt the entire project from scratch in Unreal Engine. It’s allowed me to hone my skills and workflows as a real-time editor and leverage my expertise in animation. I’ve also been able to dabble in areas like lighting, cinematography and sound design. Not to mention the day to day technical challenges that naturally arise when working in the real-time space.

Below is a real-time capture of the project as it stands today. There are many things I’d like to tweak, clean-up and improve, but such is the nature of art. My hope is to share some of my learnings from the project and maybe provide a touch of inspiration to other people who want to create and tell stories.