BLUE

Project Brief

Blue is a short film that portrays the loneliness and boredom that comes from advanced technology surrounding our everyday lives. Me and the co-director, Olivia Stacey participated in every production pipeline of the film including screen writing, story-boarding, filming, editing, and editing. The holographic interfaces and the overall VFX was my responsibility to nuance the hi-tech environment that the main character is residing.

Pre-Production

Based on the script that was written by myself and our co-director, we drew a quick storyboard to layout the shots we need to film in site. We wrote down minimal details, as we both had less exposure to on-site filming and figured we might have a lot of changes to be made during film shooting. Visual effects that are to be added post-shooting were written down to be noted while staging the set.

VFX

There were three main VFX shots for the film- when the MC is sitting down on the sofa, when MC is interacting with the interface on the table, and when they are calling their friend that appears a holographic bust. I used Adobe After Effects to create the animated graphic interfaces and composite them into the shot.

Clean Plate

Rough Roto

Detail Pass + BG replacement

Glow

Keyframing Holographic Interface + Colorgrading

Living Room VFX

After separating MC and the sofa from the wall and background objects using AE Keylight and some manual clean-up, I merged the wall again with the graphics put. The sofa scene was good to go after adding some glow emitted by the graphics, animating the holographic interface to follow MC's gaze. Color grading was done after the entire VFX work was done.

Calling Scene VFX

The footage of the friend was shot on a green screen room. After keying the silhouette roughly out of the BG, I corrected the color of the footage to be blue to match the other holographic interfaces. I added some reflection by duplicating the edited footage and blurring, as well as some glow.

BG plate + Clean plate

Keying

Color Correcting +

Digital Effects

Positioning

Reflection

Glow

Coffee Table VFX

I designed the interactive screen being projected on the coffee table to resemble a modern tablet with a stand. I focused on a lot of details, such as making the UI appear like it is 'usable'. The weather that tells MC how cold and inhabitable the weather is, is a tiny background detail we decided to put in to provide some of our audiences the hint how the world that MC is living became. The compositing progress is identical with the living room shot.