Burn Out

This is my thesis film, Burn Out. It explores the concept of burnout and how it effects students, specifically students working on their own thesis films. The logline is: A frazzled film student's burnout takes physical form, and threatens more than just her ability to finish her thesis film. With this film I wanted to show that even thought students may believe their unhealthy habits help them finish their work, they eventually will lead to burnout, and the work will suffer for it.

I took a lot of inspiration from horror films from the 70s and 80s, specifically slashers and giallos. I wanted to this film to give off the same feel as these films, so I drew a lot from the main themes and filmmaking techniques I noticed while watching them, such as neon lighting, a strong female protagonist, and a spooky monster antagonist that is really a metaphor for something else. 

Originally the story was about a student working on their film from home, and the monster was a big fiery beast. Eventually the story changed so that the protagonist is working at school and the monster became more of a burnt, bubbling corpse of the protagonist.

Below is my storyboards for the film in animatic form:

Final Character Designs

To making doing backgrounds easier, I made a 3D model of the set in blender, and then drew over screenshots in Photoshop.