Silhouette Shortfilm

Pitch

Claire is a young woman who just moved to a big city. She will quickly start to witness her body disapearing, as a visual representation of her isolation and loneliness...

Movie & Making-Of

Some shots of the movie

The Artistic Direction

We spent some time on pre-prodution to create our own artistic direction. We were mostly inspired by the work of Alberto Mielgo, and we wanted to find the right balance between a realistic look and a stylized handpainted style.

Some concept that were made to established the mood of the movie :

Some sketches to try to find the right handpainted look :
We later used our own custom brushes on Substance Painter to make our assets and get a unique handpainted style.

The characters design

For Claire, we went for angular shapes and dark colors, opposed to her neighbour, for whom we used more rounded shapes and bright colors, since she's a friendly person.
Eventually, the clothes and hair of the neighbour ended up changing, for practical reasons during production.

We used Vray in Houdini to shade our characters and all of the assets of the movie.
We started by painting stylized textures in Substance Painter, with custom paint brushes.

We used graphic patterns in the diffuse color and in the roughness maps so that it would interact with the different lightings throughout the movie, and add a layer of stylization.

3D & 2D Environments

Matte paintings
For most large environment, we used matte paiting to bring some paint effect into the decor.
After a first 3D pass, we painted over with our stylized brush to then reproject it. On this shot, the background was fully painted, to reduce unecessary rendering.

The transparency effect 
We achieve Claire's invisibility effect in compositing. After a few trials of shading in 3D, we decided to do it in comp, to be able to tweak it as we wanted.
We started by rendering 2 passes of Claire, one with the normal shading and one with the invisibility shader.
The effect was then achieved by using a mask of an aquarel pattern projected on the character.

The silhouettes
For the crowd that you see all along the movie, we actually used real footage of our friends walking on a threadmill. Then, we painted over and used Ebsynth to help with interpolation, and get a full sequence of painted footage. 

In order to work faster, we also made some shots on Blender with Cycles

Stylized motion-blur
We stylized the motion-blur in compositing for certain sequence of the movie. We wanted to add more painted effects, more chaos, using the camera movement. The goal was to match with the intensity of Claire's emotions, especially during the panic scene.

Main Team : 

We hope you enjoy our film as much as we enjoy making it !
The Silhouette Team :)