I have always been interested in complex mechanical machines from past ages. A lot of the inspiration behind the mood of this project came from the movie The Prestige. My key takeaway was the process of optimizing for animation. I didn't know what I was doing when first lighting the model, so when I revisited the project two years later to animate it, I had to relight everything, choose different rendering options and add effects in post in order to make my render times realistic.