The form of Severance Intro Title Sequence is 3D Animation
Severance focuses on the balance between life and work and is set in a company with memory-cutting technology.
The animation illustrates the protagonist’s life struggle between professional and personal predicaments. Work personality and life personality constantly shuttle and pull in the grid.
The work represents the mystical journey of these different identities memories of experiences, grief, loss, and control in one body through the use of surrealism and subtle ironic humour. The protagonist switches from one scene to another and the different scenes are linked by objects that working people use throughout the day, lifts, hoovers, beds, etc.
In terms of visual expression, the strong minimalist modernist aesthetic, the warmthless cold light, the repetitive approach and the symmetrical composition show the rules and limitations of the workplace, depicting a working man like an emotionless machine working non-stop on an assembly line.
The scene in which people are being poured out of the coffee cup is my favourite. I think he depicts the state of people in the workplace going with the flow through the ‘labour and capital perspective’, implying some kind of control. People looking and running, trying to escape but unable to do.
In the use of technology, Firstly the main characters were created by 3d scanning, and based on 3d meshes texturing the skin and combing the hair in Houdini software. Secondly, Cloth creation and rigging were also done in Houdini and Marvelous Designer, with the rest being a combination of motion capture suites from Xsens. finishing touches in Houdini and Cinema 4D, and finally rendering in Octane.
The molten and sticky effect made through model deconstruction enhances the expression of the chaotic and muddy state of being caught up in work and life. This state, coupled with the slow and urgent music, makes people naturally immersed in the bizarre atmosphere.
There is a lot of symbolic expression in this animation, and the use of symbolic elements to make the images and expressions more interesting is what I most wanted to learn from this animation.