"Amasia - Origins" the forming of a new continent

Hello readers,

Today I bring you the short film Amasia: Origins that I stumbled upon whilst browsing 3dtotal. Created by students graduated from ArtFX, this film is a depiction of an event that could potentially happen in earth's future. For me the story makes more sense when you know a little more about the idea behind it and where the title comes from. So what is Amasia?

Image courtesy of google images

As you all know the earth is split up into several different continents, these being Europe, North America, Asia etc. But this was not always so. The tectonic plates that shift and move carrying the bits of crust we know as continents were once all connected, creating supercontinents, this meant most of the main landmasses were combined into one huge landmass. Throughout earth's history it is believed that this has happened on numerous occasions, all separated by hundreds of millions of years. The oldest known of these was Nuna, formed around 1.8 billion years ago, which is believed to of lasted around 100 million years before before it began to break apart to start another cycle of continents. Rodinia and Pangaea have since formed and broken apart resulting in the continents we have today.

Amasia is the predicted supercontinent that experts believe will be formed in the next few hundred million years as Asia smashes into the Americas after the Artic ocean and Caribbean sea have disappeared. This prediction has been made based on current landmass movements.

With this knowledge of what Amasia is the video should now make a lot more sense. The film is beautiful as it is tragic and paints a very bleak outlook for earth's inhabitants if this global shift where to occur. From what I can fathom, the planet is hit by a large solar flare, demonstrated by the satellite being destroyed at the start. Also the large amounts of Aurora Borealis (Northern lights) can be seen spread across the planet, these are normally only located at either of earth's polar regions. This is the part that I don't understand, as a solar flare wouldn't have any effect on the tectonic plates as far as I'm aware. This doesn't necessarily matter as the visual effects of this sequence are at a truly high level and really add to the drama. 

The rest of the film plays out as the planets water drying up resulting in a huge exodus of people leaving the cities looking for a safe refuge but finding none. The population is shown dying off wrapped in scraps of clothing they could find to protect themselves from a planet getting ever colder gripped in a new ice age (that's the bleak part). 

The final act of the film beautifully depicts the planet going through numerous cycles as the ice begins to melt ending with a very strong scene of a human hand creating what seems to be a cave painting. This starting another cycle of human civilization on the new supercontinent Amasia.    

The film combines computer generated animation and live action footage which really works well and these students should be very proud of what they have achieved. The message and the story of this short film are completely subjective and open to your own interpretation. We at SoVibrant would really like to hear how you interpreted this story.

Thanks for reading and enjoy the film.

Ryan Blackburn - Media Productions

www.sovibrant.co.uk