HOTARU is my gratuation film at the film school La Fémis.
I made the film using various techniques : infrared camera to shoot the actress over 4 nights of real sleep, studio shooting for the forest sequence, found footage, 3D scan of the actor, Google Earth...
Here are some documents about the making of the film.
Storyboard made by Margaux Remaury. The little letters refer to each CGI plant to buy online.
That scene was inspired by this beautiful scene in "Running On Empty".
I wanted everything to be transparent in the woods. So we shot the actors in a black studio and added 3D plants. The final texture of the pictures is made by reducing the number of colors in a bitmap compression.
Our super tiny film crew !
The actor Olivier Lin was scanned to make a 3D model of him. It was a way for me to represent a memory : a 3D model can crumble, shatter, just like a memory. The low quality of the 3D scan was important to represent the memory of a face that you start to forget.
Using found footage was also a way to represent the character's unlimited memory. Martha can remember each sunset she saw, just like typing "sunset" in Google Image.
The scene of the landscapes turning into polygons and disapearing is made in a very simple way, using Google Earth : I just recorded those few seconds when the landscapes are loading, and reversed it.