Filling a Room with Paper Visual FX

So, I had a strange idea… I wondered what it would look like if we film a room neck high with paper.

Now this wasn't for no reason whatsoever, this is for one of my short films called ‘Tearaway’ for a visual representation showing what it would be like if you were being confined by lots of ideas and distractions in your head.

In the film we represented this with paper, making a physical metaphor of something you can't see im reality. The process of doing this was very difficult.

With a lot of pre-planning and permission from the location the project came together.

To get all the paper, we used layers of plain paper on top and underneath we used hundreds of sheets of leftover newspapers.

In order to get the effect of filling the entire room efficiently we used a large sheet which had been suspended at the four corners using light stands for the paper to sit in.

At the base of this sheet a small hole was made for the actor to stand in and be swamped by the paper. When the actor wasn't there, we simply tied up the the hole.

Positioning the paper filled sheet at different points around the room and tooking photos with the camera in the same position got accurate lighting on the paper and gave us enough options to fill any gaps.

To stitch them all together, we used Adobe After Effects to mask out of the different points where the paper overlap each other. In places where we didn't manage to get the paper to the walls, I would take some of the photo and move it to the edges and once you stitch all together you get a shot that looks like this!

Sadly the shot was only used for a few seconds. However, in my opinion it looks great!