Gaoyuan Chen
24/7，Gaoyuan Chen & Xiaoyu Jia ，3D film，5m44s，2022.1
In reality everything operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a world where the circadian sense of time has been blurred or even lost, where there is no 12-hour day or 12-hour night, there is only eternity, overexposed daylight that fills the pores of every day and every week. Digital technology and the internet have created a myriad of landscapes in our world, where the boundaries between the virtual and the real are gradually blurred, and the human body is objectified, randomly placed and distorted. We jump back and forth from grid to grid, torn between work, capital and eternal anxiety. And when we finally think that our bodies have escaped, what we welcome is the infinite ruins and the desolation of meaning - we have long since become everything, fused with the landscape, and everything is our body.
Form-oriented
This film was produced using Unreal 5. The characters were photographed and keyed, then transformed into "paper man" animations in UE, and then combined with the scenes.
This project is formally orientated because I'm not familiar with the technology and I can't guarantee that I'll be in a position to produce what I want to express, so the animations were gradually experimented with in the course of researching the Unreal engine.
filming site
Photomontage
The way I initially intended to use was virtual filmmaking, synthesising characters into virtual scenes in real time. However, in the process of trying, I found that there were more bugs in the software, which could not be solved, and the conditions of the green screen in the scene were simple, so the effect of character synthesis was poor.
Under the research of Zhu Yuheng, the programme leader in the group, we discovered a new way of compositing. Firstly, we recorded the characters in advance in the green screen studio, and then imported the video into UE's scene for keying, so that it could be used freely as a mapping animation.
Problems ensued, however, as the video (MOV, MP4, etc.) could not be played at the same speed as the in-engine animation in UE's rendering, so in the end we had to use PNG video. However, PNG format files are extremely large, so it was not possible to add too many character animations on the same screen, only one or two could be used.
Because of the lack of the character part of the effect, I will focus on the scene animation, the character most of the time in the middle of the scene above the scene, can better cover the lack of character composite effect.
still frame
Scene Art
Because of computer performance limitations and to avoid frequent software crashes, I created three medium-sized scenes instead of creating one large scene with all the elements piled on top of each other. I used a lot of fog effects to create the atmosphere, but also to reduce the visibility and ease the pressure on the computer. The style of the scenes is mainly surrealistic, I don't want to use virtual technology or rigorous reproduction of reality.
still frame
Animation Design
The animations are all created by me using keyframe editing within UE. I've been experimenting a lot with keyframing to try and play something different out. The character animation is "paper", so my camera animation is relatively smooth, mainly keeping the objects in the scene moving.
The second act of the film has more active camera movement, but it's also always kept right up against the character animation mapping. For the character jumping part, I used keyframe editing on the table and kept tweaking it to manually simulate the floating feeling of the table as well as the force effect when jumping on the table.
Narrative and Perception
The film is narrated mainly through scenes, and the content is implied through the elements in the scenes and the language of the camera. Through three acts, the film shows the life of an ordinary Chinese man. After spending their student years in a grey school, they seem to become free after leaving, but they are bound by their never-ending work, and eventually spend their short lives as end-of-life consumables going into a landfill waiting to be recycled.