Description
STARGRAVE is a retro-futurist sci-fi animated short set on E-701, a silent planet already marked for dismantling. K, a planetary recovery operator, arrives for a routine salvage mission. When a small golden maintenance vehicle steals her N-17 power source, the chase leads her beneath the surface to the remains of a vast civilization built around a dying planetary core.
The vehicle does not take the energy for itself. It uses the stolen power to wake an abandoned archive and hands K a memory chip no bigger than a thumbnail. Inside is the final record of a society that tried to keep its world alive through extraction, unequal distribution of energy and sacrifice, until the system built to sustain life consumed the people it was meant to protect.
Tripothon asks entrants to build a world as a gift, and in STARGRAVE that gift is memory. The title is a deliberate pun: hidden in STARGRAVE is "the star gave". In its final act, a dead world gives its memory to a stranger. It does not ask to be resurrected; it asks to be witnessed. By carrying the chip away, K gives the forgotten a future in someone else's memory.
The team used Tripo to turn key mechanical and architectural designs, including the shuttle, the golden maintenance vehicle, the power module and the ruins, into reusable 3D assets that fix scale, orientation, spatial relationships and continuity across shots. Seedance 2.5 then translated them into a restrained, serious hand-drawn retro sci-fi animation style in the Franco-Belgian tradition. DaVinci Resolve was also part of the toolkit.
How Tripo was used
In STARGRAVE, Tripo was used for concept images, selected 3D models and key-shot previs, linking concept, modeling, graybox previs and the final images.
- Concepts and models: Tripo generated concept images to explore designs for the golden vehicle, the power module, the shuttle and the ruins, then generated the core models among them as reusable 3D assets.
- Graybox previs: for shots with complex scale or easily confused directions, the team built graybox scenes from these assets to verify framing, camera, scale, orientation and mechanical connections, locking continuity across shots.
- Into animation: the previs results then guided Seedance 2.5 in producing the final hand-drawn Franco-Belgian sci-fi animation.
