In the second 64kb intro we made with Tooll, I played with de(con)struction: I wanted glitches, video artefacts, wild editing synced to an abstract IDM track.

The first test scenes were really abstract and more following a 2D flat black and white scheme you can see at the first 30 seconds.

Sadly this didn't work well with the wonderful music by Szelei Kis Gergely (Gargaj). So the final piece got a little bit away from the original concept sketches.

Malewitsch was originally meant to be a proof of concept for Still's new realtime content creation suite for 64kb intros: Tooll. After working ages on abstract bitmap scenes for texture generation, we decided that it would be much better to work on a concrete project. The inspiration for the theme came from lead programmer Daniel Szymanski (cynic), whose common test scene consisted of a black square on a white background: Suprematism at its best.

A world of cubes

I started with sketching in Photoshop and I finally developed a concept around a world of cubes. This basic object promised both to be a sufficient building block for quiet complex scenes and easy enough to be implemented. In a quick session I came up with a motion sketch in Maya which I slightly boosted up with post processing. This was supposed to be our reference for the next couple of months: Our goal was to reproduced this animation in 64kb.

Original 3d models were rebuilt with Tooll using basic mesh and scene operators. With these sample scenes, we worked on a look which was doable with a shader model 2 post render pipeline.

Tooll's very basic instancing and replicate operators proved to be friendly for experiments. Playing around with realtime building blocks became a steady source of inspiration.

Look

I played around with Photoshop to get a grip on a general idea for the lighting and colors. When I was satisfied with my reference image, I spent the next days implementing this look with post render effects.

We finished Malewitsch at the party place in Barcelona. I still remember this as one of my favorite demo scene events because of the wonderful familiar atmosphere and all the great people we met there.