making of “dans les bois”
Hey! I've already shown you the trailer of my graduation film, so this time I'd like to give you a little bit of an insight into the process behind it. So here's a tiny making of. I don’t have a lot of pictures, but hopefully you'll find the description itself useful. Let's use The Wolf Scene for visualising the process step by step.
Each scene has to be planned in terms of composition and movement of the characters. The Wolf Scene was the very first shot I imagined, when I started working on this project. I knew that it would be the key scene, so I wanted it to look quite "impressive" haha :) I imagined a huge wolf like creature lurking from behind the trees and walking with big thumping steps through the forest. And so I made the concept:
And here’s a beautiful concept of the scene made by Arthur (http://zhaphod.tumblr.com/):
Ok, so we have the concept and now what ? Let's begin with creating a layout. To be honest I didn't have any idea of how to do it ! Really. I had some graphic references, like "Limbo" game, the shadow theatre and the beautiful shadow boxes (thank you Nunu for the great idea ! ). And that's all. I had to test a lot of things and figure out which way would suit me best. I knew that making a bunch of real shadow boxes for all the scenes would be simply impossible (since I only had like 5 - 4 months to complete my film), so I tried fixing the layout together on a little multiplane we had at the school. Unfortunately it didn't look as well as I had hoped it would. Finally someone suggested using After Effects and compositing layers cut out of paper and simulating the multiplane-like look. The outcome turned out to be just what I've been looking for!
Once I found my way of creating backgrounds I had to have all of the layers cut out of paper. By taking a picture of each layer on a light table I created myself quite a "forest library", from which I could later composit my dream backgrounds. But to be honest, I'm not really good at cutting things out of paper, so I desperately needed help. Thankfully at my school there was a week, specifically designed just for that purpose, where the first year students are helping their older colleagues (I mean us lol) with their grad films. I was lucky to collaborate with Beatrice, who loves doing scenography. And she is precise like a surgeon! After the week she decided to work with me until the end of the production. So she is the one responsible for all the beautiful forest layers full of painstaking details ! And so yes - look at the film scenes, it's a handmade work (except one or two layers I had to cut on photoshop due to lack of time)!
As soon as I had a new layer done I went to a stop motion studio called "Dynamotion" where I could work on a super pro multiplane! The purpose of taking pictures under the multiplane camera was to capture the beautiful light effect.
Animation time ! As in the case of my layout I wasn't sure how can I do it. At the beginning I thought I could make a cut out animation, but when I started animating this way I realized it wouldn't be possible to finish the film in time. Finally I decided to animate it on Tvpaint, but I wasn't quite sure if it would work. It was a really hopeless period for me ! Just take a look at the wolf without all the effects !
The pictures are taken, the animation is finished, so I can composite them together in After Effects. It is also time for adding more light effects, colour grading and so on. At the beginning of postproduction I thought I'm good at After Effects. Then I learnt that I know NOTHING about it. I had to test everything and follow advices of my classmates to find a way of making the scenes look as I wanted.
So here you are, a little (horror) story of my film. It was a challenge to make it but it's done! So now I can forget about it and start watching a new season of Stranger Thing
The vimeo premier of my film is on 31st october ! 🎃
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
jbbartram-illu
pixelskylines
kaledo-art