What is Consciousness?Experiments thatbecame a story

As a creative director who originally worked as an animator / designer for over a decade, learning new tools or thinking of new ways to use old ones is part of the trade. Over a few years I had an After Effects file I’d use to try out new effects, plug-ins, programs, or just to try out an idea. One day I thought “there is some really interesting stuff in here. I should try rendering these out and make a video to post”. Right away I realized, just like any other project, it needed some structure or story to be interesting. Around this same time an author I enjoy released a book about the natural of consciousness and it sent me down a rabbit hole of reading about the mind and meaning. I decided to pull a quote from one of the books and use it as the central theme. This quote is from a book with a likely outlandish but mind-bending theory about consciousness called “Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”.I didn’t use everything from that file but I did use some tests with ink footage, capturing paint strokes, some Octane renders exploring refractions, some renders of animating OSL textures, an AI Neural Network algorithm I was experimenting with, and finally I ended up using an AI to do the voice over. Like with most personal projects, there is never enough time to make it perfect and I’m always second guessing the quality of it, the point of it, or the wisdom of putting it out in the world. In the end, it helped me to push my creativity, sharpen some skills that were becoming dormant and make something interesting, so I’m happy.