Title: Echoes of Love
Logline: In a neon-drenched dystopic future, an advanced cyborg learns the truth about herself when her “husband’s” real wife awakens from a coma. As betrayal shatters her reality, she’s forced on the run from the corporation that created her, haunted by memories and an identity that may never have been hers to begin with.
As avid readers know, I’ve begun using Unreal Engine for animation. You can read about my initial steps and fumblings here. I decided to make a cyberpunk short film (my favorite genre). The video above shows some quick render tests from selected scenes, along with a working title and logline, to give you an idea of where this project is heading. Here follows some more insights about how the project is progressing so far:
City Design
I’ve spent A LOT of time on city design. Cyberpunk cities have roots in film noir and tech noir, and they need to be a living, breathing thing of their own. The city has gone through several iterations before I finally landed on something I liked.
I ended up with a future scenario, where higher temperatures have turned most of Earth into a desert, and people have gathered together in metropolises surrounded by massive dams to keep the rising oceans at bay:
Character Design
To save money and time, I ended up choosing three main characters that needed blendshapes, which I can manipulate with the LiveLink ARKit app:
The woman cyborg, who discovers she’s only a substitute for a real human wife.
The husband, who is grieving over his comatose wife.
Dr. Nolan, who is taking care of the comatose wife.
I also have a character whose face we never see directly. For him, I manually animate very basic facial blend shapes (mainly the jaw) when he speaks.
The mysterious boss, who keeps track of all the cyborgs.
I chose the mysterious route for the assassin and gave her a helmet because she doesn’t speak much. It makes her seem more inhuman and saves me time and money because I don’t have to pay for facial blend shapes or animate her face.
The assassin, who is tasked to hunt the rogue cyborg wife.
What’s Next?
Even though I’ve come far, there’s still much to do. Here’s what’s next in the pipeline:
- Animate the final scenes
- Cast and direct the right voice actors (this include getting facial tracking for them)
- Sound design
- Put together the right soundtrack (composing an actual film score is to expensive for this project),
- Create a final edit
- Post-production (including color grading)
- Get it into the short film festival circuit