''TILL THIS DAY'' CGI Short Film
CG Animated Short Film ”Till This Day” is about a man with a haunted past visits a town where an accident took place that claimed his brother, he returns to face his past, but not all is what it seems.
Thriller / Mystery / Psychological Thriller
MORE ABOUT THE STORY:
The story is about a man who used to work in the coal mines, Centralia, PA. When an accident happened a fire broke out. He worked there along with his brother who strangely disappeared in the mines when the fire appeared. Many years after he decides to come back to this ghost town because he keeps on having flashback & hallucinations about the incident. He comes back to find his brother. The incident is based on a true story. The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause is still a matter of debate. It is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet over an 8-mile stretch of 3,700 acres. As he comes back he experiences visions & hallucinations of his brother. He faints out and finds himself deep in the burning mines when he panics and starts running. Afterwards he finds himself in the control room where they used to process the coal. He wanders around where he has his last vision of his lost brother and that’s when the short film ends. Right at the end we come to realize that man never had a brother. It was all in his head. While the majority of hallucinations reported in primary psychotic disorders are auditory, they may also be visual, olfactory, tactile, or gustatory. Visual hallucinations have been reported in 16%–72% of patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. The day the disaster happened he had unlocked this atrocious disorder in the accumulation of stress and emotional life events like the following one. Physical, genetic, psychological and environmental factors can make a person more likely to develop the condition even the toxic fumes from the mine fire could trigger a psychotic episode.
TECHNICAL INFO
I wanted to try something new with the outstanding technologies Unreal Engine has given us. That’s where the exciting part comes – I achieved such results using the UE 4.27 version not only for production purposes only but for faster workflow. I used NVIDIA’s newest real-time raytracing plugin – RTX GLOBAL ILLUMMINATION (RTXGI) to provide the most accurate lighting as possible. Motion Capture was very limited so I had to be careful with the character’s behavior given the circumstances but MOCAP Online did an amazing job for more low-budget projects. Facial animations & expressions were done using the METAHUMAN Creator by Epic Games captured from an iPhone. Overall I truly believe real-time rendering will play huge part in filmmaking in the close future & that’s why I’m here for - to be a part of it’s journey.
MORE ABOUT REAL-TIME RAYTRACING
Ray tracing techniques have long been used in film, television, and visualization for rendering photo-realistic images for a long time but required powerful computers and time to render each image or frame. For film and television, it can take many hours or even days to render out high-quality image sequences, but the final result can create real-life 3D content that can blend seamlessly with real-life ones. For architectural visualization companies, ray tracing has meant creating beautiful renders for the automotive industry or showing what a densely-filled house or office complex could look like when complete all while achieving realistic-looking results.
The power of Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) combined with Real-Time Ray Tracing (RTRT) makes it possible to create interactive experiences with subtle lighting effects comparable with many offline renderers in real time. Ray tracing effects look more natural, producing soft shadowing for lights, accurate ambient occlusion (AO), interactive global illumination, reflections and more.
