The development of this short film started with the goal of showing an impossible "reality" in a realistic way with a 3d animation.
I also had the idea of using optical illusions and various effects. However, I didn't want to just put one effect after another but
I wanted to tell a story. The next step was to look for optical illusions that would work in a realistic, animated environment
and could also be part of telling the story.
There are no cuts in this film, everything is shown by a continuous camera movement. Yet storywise the film is split into 5 scenes.
There is more information on each scene including references to works of artists that have inspired me and some technical details.
1: Vase and Face
2: Flowerpot and Heart
3: Painter's Tools
4: Woman at the Window
5: Reunion in the Painting
Vase and Face
The starting point of the story is the vase that shows two faces in its negative.
This optical illusion is also known as Rubin-Vase (named after psychologist Edgar Rubin). First examples already appeared in the 18th century.
I tried to do an animated version of this illusion and let the faces interact (kiss). Finally one face (the man) leaves the vase which
symbolizes the separation.
Technically the animation of the vase is done this way:
The vase is made out of splines. These splines, which form the contour of the vase and thus the faces, are animated. I wanted to achieve the
impression of the vase being formed on a turning turntable. The vase itself couldn't be turned because this would have made it impossible
to animate the vase. Therefore the bump and displacement maps that form the typical bumps and grooves are turned around the object.
Flowerpot and Heart
The camera shows a lonely sunflower and an empty saucer. Immediately it is revealed what has happened to the other flower. It is lying on the floor
among the broken pieces of the flowerpot. The camera circles around and reaches a position where the pieces form a new object - a heart.
Two artists and their works have inspired me to do this scene:
Felice Varini
(left) and Shigeo
Fukuda (right, Piano in the mirror). Their works reveal a meaningful
entirety when they are viewed from one specific position. Viewed
from somewhere else their works only show meaningless jumble.
Painter's Tools
This scene shows various cans and tools. The camera passes by a few brushes and one of them seems to paint in the air. Yet the paint
flows down on the wall and covers a small painting. This paradox is achieved by a very specific camera work and the right perspective.
The paint actually is on the wall, but from the camera's view it seems as if the brush was the source of the paint.
There are a lot of optical illusions that make use of perspective
paradoxes. Well known are the works of MC
Escher. The interesting thing is that these paradoxes can be
built in reality, even
with Lego. But they only work from one specific perspective.
The Penrose Triangle is another paradox. The picture below shows
one possible construction.
Woman at the Window
This scene is a variation of the effect that objects viewed from a specific position form a new object.
A drawing of Sandro del Prete (left)
gave me the idea of using that in the short film too as it fits very well storywise.
Reunion in the painting
The short film ends in the painting that first works as some kind of X-ray screen showing another reality in a painted way. The man is
coming home and the couple immediately embraces. The camera moves into the painting, shows the reunited sunflowers and finally the finished
vase.
The painted sequences were rendered like the others and then filters were applied using batch processing in Photoshop. AfterEffects was
used to do the compositing. The characters were animated using Character Studio.
