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French
Nizar Anan, Léa-Marie-Lune Cloatre, Victor Jonnet, Henri Palumbo, Ludovic Sardain, Léo Serrano from French digital arts school ARTFX (class of 2022) have unveiled Watchers, their thesis short film. This short film is a blend of fantasy and drama.
Tom and his daughter Lily suffer from the death of Laura, his partner and her mother. She has become a Watcher, an inanimate person floating in the air above the population. But Tom cannot come to terms with her disappearance.
The team also unveiled a making-of video that will give you a good idea of how the short film was shot, and how the visual effetcs were created.
Due to security issues and given the lack of space, the student couldn’t shoot this ARTFX short film on top of a real building. Instead, they built a small wall and rented scaffoldings. They then extended this set using CGI. The team also had weather-related issues: due to heavy rain, the film was partly short indoors, which means the students had to light the set so that it would match the outdoors shots.
The team created a full CG city and huge CG scaffoldings to extend the set. Since some elements were seen from up close, they had to be quite detailed.
In order to create the Watchers, a key element of this ARTFX short film, the team relied on photogrammetry.
Last, but not least, the making-of video will tell you about the FX work: cloth simulations, bent metal, particle effects.
