Silhouette shares the innocent vision of a little girl, Amelia, who imagines playing hide-and-seek with her older sister Sara. Through a contemporary dance sequence led by Tambour’s soundtrack, Sara brings the little girl back to life, until the audience discovers she comes from Amelia’s imagination.

I had the chance to be VFX supervisor on the set of Silhouettes. I did two of the cleanup shots (The first and last shots were made by Randy Santandrea) and spent a lot of time working on particles simulation since it was originally planed to have rocks and grass particles floating with Amelia. Sadly, the decision was made to drop those shots and remove the particles from the script.

Rocks, grass and lights

I’m still very proud of the results on those particles. It was a good chance to go through tracking, stabilizing, 3D environments, HDRIs and lighting.

There are 3 particles simulations in the shot. The shining lights where tracked with the floor to give the motion more impact and make the look of the girl react accordingly.

The grass and rocks are directly shaded in Nuke. I used an HDRI to simulate the environment in a basic lighting situation. I then used the depth matte and lens information to provide depth of field and lens distortion. No tests were completed at pickup so I had to guess my Iens distortion (If anyone has distortion map for Anamorphic Lomos, let me know !)

Rest of the job

Those RED 8K anamorphic files where enormous and a nightmare to work with. Most of the work was done with 2k proxies to make everything run smoother.

The director chose to reuse shots where Sara was originally performing with Amelia but ask for her to be alone in the frame. Those were easy cleanups and I only used projection mapping on one of them.

At the end, I very like the opportunities this project gave me. Sometimes people change their minds and it’s ok.

I am saddened by the fact those particles did not make it, but i’m still very happy to had worked on it and teach myself something.