Blind
Final Year Graduation Film
The story is a fictional thriller based on a cult that lived in the Western Ghats of 17th-century India.
They raided and pillaged settlements around them,
led by an individual called the high priest.
Apostacy was met with doom.
The film follows a character named Behram who wants to escape this cult.
An opportunity presents itself in the form of a little girl named Parvi, who was captured by the cult.
Character Design
After the script was written it was time to visualize the characters in the film.
I designed four characters:
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Behram (protagonist)
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The High Priest (antagonist)
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Amir Ali (side kick)
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Parvi (damsel in distress)
Behram is the protagonist of my graduation film "Blind"
Behram is the protagonist of my graduation film "Blind"
The Antagonist of my graduation film "Blind"
The Antagonist of my graduation film "Blind"
Behram's friend (the sidekick)
Behram's friend (the sidekick)
Parvi is one of the character's of my graduation short film "Blind"
Mood board for costume design
Parvi is one of the character's of my graduation short film "Blind"
Storyboard
Now that the look and the characters were finalized, it was time to visualize the script into storyboards.
Here I experimented with camera angles and compositions.
After multiple iterations, this version was finalized.
Thought I'd do this in pencil. uk as a keepsake.
Thought I'd do this in pencil. uk as a keepsake.
Set Design
The idea was to create the sets in Blender and the animation in 2d using grease pencil.
The goal was to make the 3D sets look like the concept art.
1. The Temple
The temple would be the place where all major ceremonious activities of the cult would take place such as prayers, and sacrifices.
I wanted the setting to be grand, with tall ceilings.
This was the initial sketch I had made for the temple featuring a large cross-shaped main hall with a very tall ceiling in the middle ending in a dome.
While the design was grand, it had its challenges.
Firstly the lack of light.
And artificially lighting this scene would be unrealistic for the time period
Lighting pass
An important aspect of the set is the statue of the goddess they worship.
I followed the design language of most Indian sculptures with exaggerated forms and curves.
After designing the sketch, the sculpt was done and added to the scene.
Learning from the mistakes of the first design, I made a new one with a large open space and large sections for more natural lighting.
I also added a large skylight to light the central portion of the set.
After modeling the scene in Blender, I used Photoshop to texture the UV maps.
This gave the set a hand-painted look.
Sunset lighting pass
For the set's background, I wanted to extend the 'grand' look for it as well. After sketching, I landed on the Idea of the temple being on the side of a cliff range. I designed the bg in a way that it could be used in multiple lighting scenarios with a few tweaks to the color.
2. The Forest
The cult gathers its resources from the forest surrounding the temple.
Since our characters are still young boys, it's only fair to assume that they would be the ones to do these chores.
Following this idea, I painted this concept art piece.
I decided to use this as a guide for the set since it had a calm atmosphere following a more serious temple set.
After the concept art, I made this layout with very rough lighting with just one sun for the main light and another weaker sunlight with a wide angle for the red glow you can observe on the middle tree.
After that, I began texturing the objects.
I used alpha cards for the leaves and a brushstroke generator plug-in for the bark of the trees.
Then, I fixed up the lighting because a lot of the areas of interest were dark, and the concept art piece had exaggerated bounce light which I added secondarily
Then just add the bg with some grease pencil grass and sparkly bits and done.
The River
The River is where Behram meets Parvi for the first time.
The idea for the design was to incorporate a physical line (which is the river) where a character from another border will have to cross.
Final piece
It all started with this sketch which i formed from elements in my mood board.
Initial Layout
Lighting pass
Basic texturing
Final pass with grease pencil elements
I made this mood board with Milanote, collecting the most eligible photographs and artworks from Pinterest based on mood and atmosphere.
Then, I made a sketch using the best bits from each image.
For example, narrower rivers have a larger concentration of rocks near the shore.
I used cooler colors for the trees to have a 'cool shade' feel for the scene.
Animation
Now that we had a set, it was time to make it come alive with the story and our characters.
According to the brief, we wanted 2D animation in a 3D set.
A shot progression showing the various steps involved in the animation process
It all started with this experiment.
In this scene, there is the default cube and a floor plane. I added the grease pencil object and used the 3D cursor as the stroke's point of origin.
This way, I could position the 'drawing' or frame in 3d space.
If there was an error in this area, moving the frame in edit mode solved it.
For a shot like this, where the set is too complex (given my time constraint) I decided to do the shot in 2D, BUT using Blender.
For this task, we turned to Blender's grease pencil. Doing this meant I had to learn a whole new tool, much less 2D animation on a 3D software.
Nevertheless, after a few days of experimentation, grease pencil turned out to be a versatile tool, used in multiple productions, such as Sony's Spiderverse franchise and in Blender Studios' work.
I painted this bg, with multiple planes or layers in photoshop, and imported the planes with their alphas into blender resulting the scene to look like this:
