Wintermoon

Download or view the 1024*576 Quicktime (150MB) version here.

This is a personal project of mine that I've been working on and of on since late 2008, wanting to create something for myself. I am very proud to present Wintermoon, a project that was born out of the dark Scandinavian winter. The movie itself does not have much of a story or purpose but was rather created to reflect a moody atmosphere and surreal scenery in combination with a time sliced camera effect (but with a small twist). This project was heavily inspired by Magnus Engsfors's piece "Suddenly". The difference lies in the technique used to create the effect as the entire movie is made up of still photographs combined with stylized backdrops animated with help of 2D and 3D graphics.

The workflow throughout the project was very much a result of insufficent economic and technologic resources. The project was put on hold a few times due to problems with collecting base material, since I lacked the resources (as stated before) to photograph or shoot the initial footage myself. Luckily I came accross Sarah Lee's Flickr portfolio where she had uploaded high resolution images of girls in dresses much like the ones I needed. Since this was intended strictly as a personal experiment, I decided to work on from that set of photos, retouching them to my desire and further creating styleframes in Photoshop of every shot. Once styleframes were in place I started 3D modelling the girl and the environment for each and every angle in Softimage. Many thanks go out to Johannes Carlsten who helped me with the modelling. The still pictures were then used to texture the 3D models in order to extract correct parallax. Models were also animated using lattices in combination with animated ICE systems . I would then normally render out 2-6 separate passes including the girl, the background,particles and smoke. These passes went on to become composited, a phase where I tried to recreate the image as it was in the styleframe. Wintermoon serves as a "proof of concept" for future projects. Working on it was tons of fun! I hope you enjoy it! Below are a few images showcasing the different stages of the workflow used for the project.

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