Introduction

This is my first personal short film which I took about 4 to 5 months (part-time) to complete.

Legend has it that a special island in the Southern Asia region will glow every thousand years due to the special alignment of stars in the universe. Qunlong wanted to make use of this rare phenomenon to propose to Roufeng but ended up being separated from her forever.

Qunlong brings Roufeng to a special romantic island

Parts of the island will glow every thousand years

Qunlong proposes to Roufeng on this special occasion

An earthquake strikes and they both fall into the water

After the ordeal, Roufeng wakes up alone with Qunlong nowhere to be found

Roufeng is devastated to find out that Qunlong has sacrificed himself to save her

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Film Theory In Use

After learning some theory on how to composite a scene, I decided to put them into use in this short film. Here are some of the simple but effective techniques that I’ve applied.

Rule of Thirds
Notice how the elements in the shot is placed at vertical and horizontal thirds.

The character is placed a third from the left and the platform is a third from the bottom.

Focus
Elements in the composition are used to direct the viewers attention to specific parts of the shot.

The broken parts of the island points towards the character to direct the viewers to the intended space. There is also some negative space surrounding the character to make her stand out from the surroundings.

Left-to-Right Rule
Characters are always walking from left-to-right (or right-to-left) except for parts where there should be confusion.

The characters walk from left to right…

carry on in that direction…

and emerges from the forest from left-to-right.

Principles of Threes
Three birds, three rocks, three chapters. Ok, you get the idea…

Notice how the rocks are grouped together in threes.

Anticipation and Overshoot
These are applied rather subtlely throughout the animation of the characters, without which there will be visible artefacts in animation.

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Making Of Semi-Red Metal Island

This is a rather long animation and there are lots of things to talk about actually. Let me just concentrate on some of the more important details.

The breaking up of the giant chains was simulated using Reactor. Each piece of the chain was turned into a rigid body and rigid body dynamics was used to solve for the motion.

Roufeng’s dress was simulated using Stitch (now known as ClothFX). Her legs were set as colliding objects. Wind forces were added to give a natural motion to the dress when she was not moving. An upward-pointing gravity was used to make the dress float upwards.

Cloth simulation using Stitch

Rain was created by creating instances of white cylinders as particles and rendering their downward motion with high motion blur. A few rain-only scenes were rendered from 3dsmax and then composited onto the CG footages.

Other than the rain, particle systems were also used for the falling leaves and underwater bubbles.

Falling leaves generated using particle systems

The underwater wave-like distortion was done using a distortion filter in After Effects.

All the glows in this film were created by applying the Video Post glow effect in 3dsmax.

Glow effects were created using Video Post glow

Other than these, the rest are just some usual stuff like simple modeling, animation etc and I shall not explain them here.

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