A Lantern in the Night

A Lantern in the Night SHORT MOVIE

Fantine Chareyre: character design; illustrations; rigging; animation.

Victorien De Cozar: CFX; environment modeling; set dressing; texturing.

Clara Gacoin: animation; layout; rigging; editing.

Laura Javel: animation; character modeling; blendshapes.

Emma Malric: VFX; texturing; rendering; compositing; final grading.

Déborah Morali: environment design; texturing, matte painting; compositing.

Maxime Ponsart: color/luma script; texturing; lighting; rendering; compositing.

PREPRODUCTION

The short movie has 3 differents light settings. Late afternoon is all about the sun setting down. The purple night is brought down by the demons and is present until they leave. Finally the blue night, which reappears when the demons flee and take their wicked purple veil back with them.

PRODUCTION

Chisato village was a lot work. 

From the numerous houses and surrounding forest to it's inhabitant, everything had to be prepared and optimized in the best way possible. 

Mash was used for the vegetation and the houses were instanced with archives RIB and so was the temple.

We wanted our short movie to have a 2d effect to remind of traditionnal japanese animation. We had to transform our 2d character concepts into 3d models that would work, make our environment look flat and hand-painted and make our demons fit right in all of this.

One of the other challenges of this film was how to make people understand that light was the key to fight back the demons. The halo is originally a watercolor circle which has been projected on a disk plane attached to the lanterns, which means it will always be facing the camera and creating this flat effect. We also used Mash to create movement and intensity variation on the halo.

The Demons mask was inspired by traditionnal japanese Noh and Kabuki theater masks.

To get a more flat style, we cut indirect lighting entirely and did our lighting in a different way to make sure, nothing was too dark. The demons were a real challenge as they were dark smoke on dark environment.

The nightmare scene is a 2d template with 3d houdini vfx. The 3d darkness tentacles had to modified in order to appear more ink like.