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Watch Silhouette, a graduation short film from French digital arts school ARTFX (class of 2023).
The film follows Claire, a young woman who has just moved to a big city. In this cold environment that immerses her in isolation and loneliness, her body gradually disappears…
The film is directed by Elliot Dreuille, Marc Forest, Baptiste Gueusquin, Alexis Lafuente, Antoni Nicolai, and Chloe Stricher. A making-of is available at the 5′ mark. The team highlights that they dresw inspiration from the work of Alberto Mielgo, who blends 3D animation with 2D elements in his projects. Which is why the team ended up creating a stylized look and put great care in the character design.
The team discusses their camera work, which significantly contributes to the film’s atmosphere and realism, as well as the character design and FX.
Also noteworthy is the way they created background characters: as mentioned starting at 8’10”, the decision was made to film real people against a green screen, then use Ebsynth to give them a stylized look. AI was used to quickly generate an approximate normal map and remove the background. Finally, motion capture from a single camera view was used to add shadows to these characters.
The end of the making-of (starting at 8:50) talks about the invisibility effect and stylized motion blur, before concluding with work on rigging and animation: key elements for a project that relies heavily on the empathy felt for the main character.
