Vergiftung
During WWIII, the world experiences hefty storms, food shortages and radioactivity. Benny is all by himself in a garage, eventually his food reserve comes to an end, forcing him to leave his shelter...
Director: Michel de Freitas
Producer: Michel Freitas
Editing: Michel Freitas
Cinematography: Michel de Freitas
Visual Effects: Michel de Freitas
Music: ELPHNT
Design: Michel Freitas
Actors: Michel Freitas, Clyde Hanna and Rita de Freitas
Screenplay: Michel Freitas
Production Company: Prism Productions
How it came to be
In January 2021, I had the urge to make a short film, so, during a math class on a rainy Friday, I came up with an idea to write a simple script for a short film: "Vergiftung" (which is "Poisoning" in German). Having written a very small and simple script, I started shooting on the same day. Many of the scenes were challenging to film because most of them were VFX, mostly representing an abstract and futuristic world. Some of the scenes required hours of patience since I had to wait for the lights to go off, which rarely happened due to my neighbours who had to always turn them on.
The VFX
This short film had so many VFX: some of them were good... and some of them were garbage. Let's start off with the good VFX, more specifically, the car VFX. Does it look real? No... but fortunately, that was my goal! I wanted to make a futuristic WWIII scenario were the sky had a dangerous look added to it. The car scene was mostly done with the help of a make-shift green screen, which helped out a lot. Now that (at the time of writing) 6 months have for some reason already passed, I see so many mistakes and it's actually hilarious how some things could be avoided. Anyways, here is a VFX breakdown I did back then:
The color grading
If you made it to the end of that video, congratulations! Now I'm going to briefly take you through the process of how I approached the color grading of this video.
I wanted to go for a colder and more depressing looking scenario, so I went for a desaturated blue color palette. I'm not the best color grader though, well, I'm not even remotely good at it, but I did find a cool LUT in Magic Bullet Looks... so I went with that!
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All in all, I don't regret making this short film, as it opened the door to so many different opportunities and ideas! Thank you to everyone who watched, shared and critiqued this short film!