STUDENT FILM. UNIKIL
I directed a short student film during my senior year in college. I had the chance and privilege to lead a team of 6 people. I have designed, lit and rendered all of the shots as well as setup the 3d pipeline. As for the characters, environments, texture work, rigs, and concept designs, it is fair to say that pretty much everybody has stepped out of their original responsibility and contributed to all aspects of the creation. The film was originally over 5 minutes long but never made it past the 3d animatic stage because of time constraints. This is an edited down version of the the original trailer.
The opening shot is a dolly that establishes the mood and setting.
Same location, different shot with altered lighting and mood...
The dolly gradually reveals amid the ruins, what appears to be the location of an ancient battlefield. A good old warm vs cool color scheme is used in order to detach the background from the foreground.
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The story narrates the quest of a father and a son to bring their loved one back from the dead. The characters were never finalized, I relied a lot on the lighting to try and hide the rough spots, not to mention the almost complete lack of proper texture work.
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And yes... It's not the most original story in the history of film making to say the least, but what it gave us in return, is a well established narrative arc against which to challenge and refine our skill set.
I modeled and retopo the character to optimize the normal maps. An extra month would have made a world of a difference. The father in the original concept was supposed to have a moustache, a hat, among other props, but sadly I didn't even have time to give him some hair cards. The characters were left visibly unfinished...
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...As a result the texture work you see here did not appear in the film. The characters had almost no texture work applied to them and were shot unfinished. The trailer really suffered from it. Directing the project, lighting and rendering every shot, on top of creating the characters proved too much, and something had to give.
The main character swipes the screen with his torch light and drives the viewer towards the center of attention.
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The environments allowed for some really great shots. The scenes were built to world scale. To give you an idea of how expansive this particular shot is, consider that tiny center blue dot in the middle to be about the size of one human being. The clockwise rotation of the shot represents the passage of time, one of the story main thematic.
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Please enjoy it for what it is : An honest attempt !
Credits: Wonjin Kim, Cody S. Laine, Marisa Gonzales, Ricardo Tena Jr, Jennifer Gilliland, Roberto Joaquin Rodriguez, Salim El Harizi.
