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a short film by Danny Yuxing Huang |
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a short film by Danny Yuxing Huang |
Yang Fan is Born (English title)/Happy Birth Day (Chinese title)
A film by Rain-Stars Pictures and the Williams Graphics Lab
10 Minutes 56 seconds. High-Definition 1280x720 progressive
Contact: Morgan McGuire
NPAR 2008 Abstract
Yang Fan is having a bad day. His girlfriend dumped him, no one remembered his birthday, and is isolated by American college culture. But maybe this birthday he will awaken from the self-imposed exile youthful pathos.
This story of touching and occasionally comic redemption is a collaboration between the student film club (Purple Valley Films/Rain Stars) and Computer Graphics lab at Williams College. It was created as an animation test for combining new digital effects with real footage. The film casts emotions as moving paintings and intercuts them with rough, disorienting footage of the compressed social interaction of college life. Of the 120 shots in the film, 75 have custom programmed "painterly" effects designed to emphasize the water and nature symbols that depict the inner state of the characters.
The film was shot directly to digital video at Williams College on a short two-day schedule in 2007. Post production took about two months to build the custom rendering effects, manually adjust parameters and effect code for every scene, dub all dialogue, and build the foley track.
The painterly effects involve selective detail reduction, saturation and tone adjustment, canvas texturing, coherence, pigment flow, and pen outlining. The effects were designed in the GLSL programming language so that they could execute on graphics accelerator cards. This allowed technical artists to change scene parameters interactively and made it possible to render the entire film in HD in about an hour on two computers for daily screenings during post production. This technique cut production time substantially and encouraged experimentation.