Echoes of Love
In a neon-drenched dystopic future, an advanced cyborg discovers her true nature as her “husband’s” real wife awakens from a coma. Betrayed and enraged, she kills him and now must outrun the corporation that created her, all the while grappling with her burgeoning identity and memories that might not even be her own.
As avid readers know, FilmDaft is all about indie filmmaking, and I’m in the trenches with all you readers.
A couple of years ago, I decided to take on the massive task to learn Unreal Engine for film production. You can read about my initial steps and fumblings here.
I quickly fell in love with the program and decided I wanted to make a cyberpunk short film (my favorite genre). Since my last update, the project has come a long way (to the point where I can see its completion), and I wanted to share more information.
The video above shows some quick render tests from some scenes, a working title, and the logline to give you an idea of where this is heading.
Here follows some more insights.
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 desert, and people have gathered together in metropolises surrounded by massive damns to keep the rising oceans at bay:
Character Design
To save money and time, I ended up choosing three main characters that needed blendshapes, 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 hire 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)
- Marketing the short film at the film festival circuit
I hope to get it out for the film festival year starting in the autumn of 2025.