Helping Hands (帮手)

The idea of my this short film is comes from my interests in Daoism (道教) and my teammates' interests in horror games. We decided to incorporate out interests to make a short Chinese horror film. Due to the scope of the project, we need to use a combination of green screen for close ups and LED walls for background and lighting.

A close up shot of actor on green screen, use for close up with ghost in post

After the script and the storyboard are set, I took the role with designing the environment for the LED wall background. Since the story take place in a mansion and due to time limit, we went to scout for assets that online with Fab (UE marketplace) and Unity asset store. The mansion interior uses the assets from Fab and the exterior from Unity.

I scale size of the mansion using the UE mannequin as reference and created environment accordingly with the need of the storyline. For the scenes, we need the exterior of the entrance, interior of the lobby, hallway, home library, and bedroom. 

With the environment settled, the team proceed to shooting in Navy Yard. There are scenes that we planned to shoot for flashbacks, which are the scenes with hands (Isabel proposed the idea). These scenes were shot first to accommodate with technical difficulties (Control PC crashed). Fortunately, we were able to utilize the time to shoot the scenes with real props and green screen.

After the PC was fixed, we went on to the LED wall shooting. I was the UE tech here to help with changing between scenes and animating opening/closing of the doors.

Image taken from my perspective, Isabel directing and filming

Most of the hard work of post-production were handled by Sarah and Isabel. With Sarah working on color grading, keying, and sound effects. Isabel with editing. I did need to render out some image sequences from the UE for specific moments. 

The coordination of working in the team is very nice, we each took responsibility in our role while filling in for one another when need. Even thought there were unexpected challenges, we still manage to find a way to resolve the issue. With this being said, there are still improvements to be made for this project, such as adding in the subtitles in the flashback scene to provide more context of what is happening in the story.