Movie - Warriors of the net

Here you can find the movie Warriors of the net in several different languages. It is the prefect tool for introducing Internet to novice users. It helps the newcommers visualise how the Net works. The movie is 12 minutes long. It is about an IP packets journey through net past routers, firewalls and transatlantic cables. It is available for free download for non-commercial use.

How they did it:

The animation part - Finding out the concept...
We started out by going through the basics about TCP/IP and how it works. I, Gunillla Elam, tried to get a grip on the elementary parts and how to visualise them in an effective manner. The first thing that struck me when we started to draw the outlines for this project was how mechanical things seems to work on a network or on the web. So, I decided to make the inhabitants of the web as machinery or parts thereof. I also wanted to have a rusty, kind of worn out look and feeling in the environment - as being filled with lots and lots of hard-working creatures...

Putting it together...
All modeling and animation was made with 3dsMAX 2.5 with the textures , lots of metals! made as bitmaps in Photoshop.
The lights were made using Cebas LumaObjects and the blue explosions were made using their PyroCluster plug-in. I made some postprocessing in Adobe After Effects and the final editing was made in Premiere.
For the web graphics I used Macromedia Flash along with Photoshop.
For self studies in 3D I highly recommend Eni Okens classes at:

The music - The stunning imagery of Gunilla Elam created the scene for the soundtrack of Warriors of the Net. I, Niklas Hanberger, started out by finding a few different motives that suited some key scenes in the story. The first that started the ball rolling was actually the firewall and router switch scenes which made me think of circus or fairground environments but then severely tilted into some strange dark metalic machinery soundscape. The tivoli theme actually exists as a more normally orchestrated recording if any orchestra out there wants to use it in their repetoir :-)
Then came the monk choir theme which sounded dooming enough to represent the journey into the unknown and also the mighty router! The whole soundtrack was built around these and a few other themes and combined so that themes represented known actors in the movie (ah, the router!) but always modified so that everything continues to move towards the end.
Apart from assorted syntheseizers and keyboards from Yamaha and Roland I made extensive use of the SoundBlaster Live card. I used sequencers from Cakewalk and Steinberg and Sound Forge from Sonic Foundry.