Honor's Red Price - Solo Short Film

I'm pleased to share this short film I made, working from January to June 2022. Except for the music, everything was made by me. Most of it is 3D, but some backgrounds are a mix of camera mapping and matte painting.

Honor's Red Price is my love letter to the medieval fantasy media I grew up with. It's also loosely inspired by one of the first stories I wrote, and the themes I wanted to explore.

This is the story of a knight who, upon returning to his castle, finds it in ruins. With his family and home gone, all he can do is one last gesture of honor. Even as he finds peace in a stained-glass sanctuary, returning his father's sword to its rightful place, the red cannot be erased from the bloody sky. On an on goes the cycle of war and vengeance, of loss and tragedy, of blood and nature, of red and green.

I grew up with the fantasy genre. Playing video games, watching movies, reading doorstopper books. It's the genre that inspired me to go into the creative field. I learned a lot with this project, and I can't wait to start working on the next one!

Scroll to see more of my process as I detail it along the way! First, let's start with 2D explorations:

To prepare for the switch to 3D, I made a handful of additional turns and sketches.

This is the result after some time in Zbrush, 3dsmax, and Substance:

After rigging, skinning, and animating the characters, I simulated their clothes and painted the backgrounds. I wanted to explore camera mapping and matte painting some more, so that's exactly what I did. Some of the textures are from Substance Painter, while others were painted on Photoshop and projected on my geometry.

Here are two examples of my lighting/rendering/compositing process:

And that's about it! I'll leave this off on a few stills from the film. I look back very fondly on this project and its production. I had a lot of fun, and I learned a lot from working alone all the way from the writing stages to the final renders.