EDEN 2045
a short film
February 19, 2014
Eden 2045 was accepted to premiere at the Cineglobe Film Festival outside CERN in Switzerland. The festival runs from March 18 - 24. Here's a list of the selected films, and more about the festival:
"Situated just outside Geneva, Switzerland, CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) is the world’s largest physics laboratory. From the 18th to the 23rd of March, 2014, CERN will host the fourth edition of the festival.
Open to short film creators from around the world, the CinéGlobe festival is truly international, the first three editions having attracted more than 4000 entries from more than 100 countries around the globe. Thanks to the strong cultural commitment of CERN and the city of Meyrin (where CERN is located), the CineGlobe festival is poised to become one of the most important festivals worldwide for films surrounding the themes of science and technology."
November 4, 2013
Here's the trailer for the short film Eden 2045. Full credits for the project can be found at the bottom of this page.
Photos: Kim Allen plays “Jess” who shares memories of mourning with Robert, a man she meets in the park. We filmed Kim using the RGBD toolkit, and then combined color and depth information to create videos that looked truly 3-D. You can see how the projected memories were ultimately rendered in the trailer above. Process explained below.
Memory Sharing
Characters in Eden 2045 inhabit a mass-simulation, consisting of a patchwork of projections that overlay on the real world, via specialized contact lenses. Similar to the way people share photos on Facebook today, the idea was that people might want to share actual memories of events. Via a search engine fully integrated into your brain, you could search a database full of archived video from the hundreds of millions of cameras that caught you taking your first steps, getting married, etc; there would be enough cameras to record that event from several perspectives, thereby allowing for 3D information to create 3D projections that could be shared on an interlocutor’s lenses.
Amsterdam-based
visual effects house Hectic Electric
designed and produced various effect shots for these projections and their
interfaces, as well as rendered the memory shots in the film. These were pieces of three-dimensional video
that were made with open source software called the RGBDToolkit.
RGBD is an ingenious open-source combination of software and hardware, which uses color information from a Canon 5D DSLR, and depth information from an infrared sensor, and takes advantage of the Kinect’s depth-buffer to construct fully 3D video. It was pioneered by James George and Alexander Porter, who also photographed the memory sequences in the film.
Members of the Hectic Electric team working on shots from Eden 2045. From left to right: Patty Veenstra, Julik Tarkhano, Julius Horsthuis, Guidovan Rijbroek, and Robbert Lubken
The challenge in doing this was to take the 3d videos coming out of the RGBD process, and project them into the park environment of the film.
For this, we first needed standard 3d tracking of the shot of the park, and used Syntheyes ™ for this.
The RGBD process spits out a .obj sequence, which means each frame of video is rendered as a 3 dimensional .obj file, accompanied by a texture file.
With Autodesk Maya, we batch-converted all the .obj files, using the commands ‘reduce’ and ‘smooth’ so that the models could be lit and shaded in interesting ways. This is necessary, because straight from RGDB the .obj’s have all the polygons’ normals facing the camera, and this makes them impossible to shade. This operation also further increases the ‘jaggedy look’ which we thought was visually interesting.
First, we tried to render the .obj sequences with Autodesk 3DS Max, but soon found out that the software was very slow with handling .obj sequences, especially multiple sequences.
Then we came upon the After Effects plug-in Element3D from Video Copilot. This package was very adept in handling multiple .obj sequences, and would render a sequence directly into the compositing environment. Also, we were able to shade the .obj’s in real time to create the desired look, including reflections.
For every memory, two .obj sequences were rendered: the original one with the original camera texture, and the converted one with the greenish shading. We mixed those manually together to get the desired finished look, which you can glimpse in the trailer.
Sept. 08, 2013: Eden 2045 is fully complete and shipped to festivals. Trailer coming soon.
Aug. 15, 2013: We've finally locked the edit and are nearly finished with visual effects and sound design on Eden 2045. Follow the film here for updates.
Jun. 14, 2013: We just wrapped production on "Eden 2045". The 10-minute short film stars Tyler Jacob Moore, from the Showtime series "Shameless", and Kim Allen from this year's Oscar-winning short film "Curfew". We shot the film for five days in Prospect Park, in Brooklyn, on the Alexa. The days were long and back-breaking, but everybody did a great job. The film is a love story, set along a running path in the future. It was shot by DP Rossana Rizzo, produced by Madeleine Sackler, and written and directed by me. We're expecting to have the whole thing finished by late August. More soon!
Writer, Director
James Lawler
Producers
Madeleine Sackler & James Lawler
Cast
Tyler Jacob Moore as Robert
Kim Allen as Jess
Katherine Warner Johnson as Katie
Tommy Walker as The Legs Model
Elinore Carrabba & Raffaello Perfetto as The Dancing Couple
Karikatura as The Band
Tonka as Robert’s Dog
Director of Photography
Rossanna Rizzo
Editors
Leigh Johnson & James Lawler
Visual Effects
Hectic Electric - Amsterdam
Julius Horsthuis, VFX Supervisor
Guido van Rijbroek, 2D Art Designer
Sander Mettes, 3D Modeler
Kees Sparnaaij, 3D Animator
Lars Snelders, Particle Dynamics
Robbert Lubken, 3D Artist
Julik Tarkhanov, Nuke Compositor
Efraim Gons, Color Grader
Jermy Verf, Intern
Remmert Makken, Freelance Matte Painter
Patty Veenstra, Producer
Music, Sound Design & Mix
BOD - New York | Paris - AOC
Pascal Bonifay & Maximillien Letaconnoux & Maxime Singer
Sound Producers: Pascal Bonifay & Fabrice Smadja
RGBD Director of Photography
Alexander Porter
Assistant Director
Clare Sackler
Assistant Camera
Behnood Dadfar
2nd Assistant Camera
Alex Waterston
Loader
Eric Paperth
Key Grip
Adam Barbay
Grips
Eric Fahy
Steven Schuermans
Gaffer
Raina Oberlin
Electricians
Josh Batista
Darcy Schlitte
RGBD Gaffer
Paul Porter
Sound Mixers
Sawrab Karim
Brian Flood
Costume Designer
Valeria Picerno
Assistant Costume Designer
Alison Kopki
Hair and Makeup
Fiona Tyson
Visual Effects On-Set Supervisor
Julius Horsthuis
Production Assistants
Novel Robbins
Thomas Pappillon
Shalae Madison
Janelle Ashley Clayton
Driver
Mark Thysell
Additional Music
“Horns of Love” by Karikatura
Ryan Acquaotta - Vocals
Dima Kay - Guitar
Eric Legaspi - Bass
Morgan Greenstreet - Drums
Joe MF Wilson -
Saxophone
Ric Becker (Performance), Daniel Linden
(Recording) – Trombone
Find out more about the band Karikatura at
KarikaturaNYC.com
Download “Horns of Love” at http://karikatura.bandcamp.com/releases
Trailer Music
Christopher Hoag
Additional Voice Recording
Kate Clark
Saxophone Player
Alex Terrier
Stunt Coordinator
Roberto Lopez
Special Thanks
Omar Acosta
Anne Barliant
Olivia Briggs
Jonathan Darman
James George
JT Petty
Renae Robinson
Lawrence Timberlake
New York City Department of Parks & Recreation
Filmed in Prospect Park, New York City
June 10 – 14, 2013
Copyright © 2013, James Lawler Productions. All Rights Reserved.