Death Stranding - ZERO BUDGET Fan Film
3 mates had 3 hours to make a short film about ‘Death Stranding’. “What is Death Stranding?” Some of you may ask. You along with many others are asking the same question. The genius game designer Hideo Kojima, most famously known for his work on the Metal Gear game series is in the process or bringing together his latest universe, ‘Death Stranding’.
Throughout 2017 and 2018, Hideo’s marketing team released several animated short films to give an insight of the overall tone and glimpse into his next story world. However, the game world he had envisioned is so deep, and presented in a way that encourages the viewer to ask questions (my favourite kind of filmmaking), the overall purpose and basic story of the game remained unknown.
The ambiguity of the trailers lead to many fan theories and discussion around the back story for the entire game. I for one, was in love with the tone and the in depth story world.
We shot our short film back in April 2018, so only had these trailers to use as reference when making out movie:
Yeah… not a lot to work with really. So, we had to delve into the fan theories to explore what might be to come and hedge out bets that they were somewhat right!
Once filming was completed, I sent over our first cut to James Crowe who worked on the Score. In the mean time, I pulled together the Visual FX and Sound Design.
Q: How did filming go?
A: Two of my mates Sam Kennard and John Andrews were over in Eastbourne for an afternoon. And all of us having a mutual interest in Death Stranding and filmmaking, we gave ourselves three hours to shoot a Death Stranding Fan Film.
Q: Did you shoot in Utar?
A: Actually, no. We shot this on the other side of the Atlantic in little old Eastbourne in the UK! It’s an amazing place for film locations!
Q: What did you shoot on?
A: We shot on a mix of three cameras, a Sony a7s for the majority, a GoPro 5 Black for the sea scenes and a DJI Mavic Air for the over cliff shot. All shots were either shot on a tripod or on a basic shoulder rig by Film City.
Q: How did you composite the arm?
A: After creating the arms based off of very few screen shots from the available trailers in 3DS Max, the arm was lit with Vray, animated and exported for After Effects. Within After Effects, the arm was tracked using Mocha and composited using the Levels effect to adjust each RGB throughout each shot so that the black of the arm matched the black of the bag.
I would always recommend that when compositing something like that on a set, that you have an object that is of the same colour and texture in place of what you are going to finally put there.
Finally, I would track over a Video Copilot optical flare to help blend the gradient of the arm along with the real flares.
Q: How did you do the hand prints?
A: Find yourself a public domain hand print, then use an effect in After Effects called ‘Roughen Edges’ to change how much of the edge of your hand print you cut away by. Animate the affect so that the hand print appears from the middle. To give it that other worldly feeling, give it some swirling motions in its liquid using ‘Fractal Noise’.
Now to make it feel a little more 3D, add an ‘Alpha Bevel’ so that you get a highlight and shadow. Next, track the hand into the scene using After Effects’ built in 3D camera tracker and animate a flipped shot of the scene on top of the hands so that it looks like they are reflecting the sky a little. BAM, BT hands.
Q: How did you animate the BT creatures with the fog?
A: I drew out the creatures using the pen tool in After Effects then applied fog from Action Essentials 2 with a black fill colour. I found that one of the best ways to make the fog blend is to think about how it would look in camera if it was really there. Would it be slightly faded if it is further away? Like mountains in the distance. Or is there a flare over the footage that could also be applied to the fog? In our case, both were true.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m actually in the process of editing my first feature film that we shot over the summer. It’s called ‘Are We Monsters’ and is about a conflicted teenager who searches for answers after her mother’s disappearance from a monster infested woodland. It’s sure to have a lot of mystery, spooks and adventure! I can’t wait to get it all together!
