This is a breakdown of the design process of my first short film; Captive: A Silhouette Story. Upon the release of this film, many of my fellow peers, as well as, some industry professionals thought that the film was an animated short, so I figured I'd do a little behind the scenes break down of how Nathan Hershey and I went about creating the visuals for this film.
I came up with the concept for the visuals based off of my memories of the road trips I would take with my family growing up. Ever since I was a small child, my favorite part of any road trip was getting to watch the trees whip by as they slowly fell into a silhouette during sunset.
All of the principle and supporting cast, as well as, some animals and additional assets (like falling leaves) were filmed on a green screen in a small studio at my school (The University of Texas). The green screen footage was then converted into alpha mattes (to create the silhouetted characters).
All of the other foreground and midground elements were vector graphics created in Adobe Illustrator. For the backgrounds we used photographs, which we then added a painterly effect to, before throwing them out of focus to replicate the bokeh (or out of focus areas) of images captured with professional cameras. From there we took all of our assets into Adobe After Effects and laid them all out in 3D space. This allowed us to use the virtual camera tool to move through our 3D space and create a parallax effect between the foreground, midground and background elements.
Being a school project, the most impressive thing about this film is that it was conceptualized, written, shot and edited (with VFX) in the span of just two weeks... who needs sleep, am I right?
