Short film with CG compositing: Mørk

It is dark. It is cold. You are alone. But there is something approaching you out of the darkness...

Story

A girl is is sitting under a lantern in a cold, dark night, waiting for something (perhaps Godot? We don't know...) when fear starts to creep into her heart. Fear grows to panic, and she starts to run away. But no matter how far and fast she runs, her fear is always inside her and she finally encounters it in a mirror.

"Mørk" is the scandinavian word for "dark" and we chose this title because our short film deals with human's fear and fear of the dark is a common concept.

Details

A third semester short film project including compositing of 3D elements and live footage. I took the responsibility of a technical director, while Frauke Kolbmüller was the artistic director.

My responsibility was the creation and composition of the CG elements for this shot including preparations at the set, creature design, 3D modeling, animation and rendering, color correction and final composition. All of this was done exclusively in Blender. There are two CG elements in this short: A leaf being blown across the main character's feet, and the ghostly skull creature (representing fear itself) that substitutes the girl's mirror image at the elevator.

Volumetric Materials in Blender

One of the most difficult challenges was achieving a fog like appearance of the creature because Blender (at that time) lacked any support for volumetric materials and rendering. So we had to resort to the trick of layered, transparent billboards with animated cloud textures. Here you can see a test rendering of the material that gave our beast a really foggy appearance: