ALICE XIA
Swan Song is my thesis film made with my teammates Christina Shi and Ellie Hui. At it's core, Swan Song is a story of love, grief, and accepting loss, told through dance. When a young ballet student, Delta, loses her lover, Theta, she struggles with the idea of facing a life without her partner. Months pass by as Delta lingers near Theta’s locker, unwilling to let go of things that hold her memory. One fateful evening, Delta is lured by a mysterious figure who leads her into a strange, imaginary world. As she steps in, Delta is greeted by her lost love, waiting at the entrance. The two join hands in a final dance together as Theta guides Delta in a journey to accepting the inevitability of endings and the beauty in death.
Our goal with this film is to depict the complicated and winding journey of overcoming loss through the universally understood language of dance. Just as we have channeled our own grief and struggles into this film, we hope to create a visual narrative that can resonate with our audience in a way that words often fail.
I acted as the Technical Director and Environment Lead for Swan Song. I was responsible for overseeing the technical aspects of production and for shaping and implementing the overall vision for the film's environments. I created rig systems for our characters, built cloth and grass simulation workflows, and helped troubleshoot any technical problems that arose in production. As the Environment Lead, I was responsible for environment modeling, texturing, and set dressing. I also contributed to animation, lighting, compositing, previs, and layout.
Trailer
Environment Progress Breakdown
It is important to us that our film challenges the typical grim and treacherous imagery associated with death. The stylized design of our environments is magical and surreal to illustrate the stages of grief as a beautiful and cathartic experience.
Our magical world is adorned with tombstones inspired by New Orleans style cemeteries and floating pieces of broken cathedral architecture. The flowers scattered throughout are culturally symbolic of death and rebirth.
We did a lot of experiments to create the look for the 'imaginary world'. To distinguish this setting from the real world, we experimented with heavy stylization using a variety of methods including painted normals in Substance Painter, compositing techniques in Nuke, and customized 3D tools.
I used MASH to create a grass simulation workflow for the environments. I used this scene as the example and created a MASH template, that was then applied procedurally to all other scenes in this world. Using this workflow, we were able to interchange the flowers and grass types seamlessly.
A lot of compositing also went into creating the look for this environment. We used different gizmos in nuke and played around with blending realistic lighting with custom AOV passes to create the look we're looking for.
Characters
Our protagonist Delta is a shy, timid, but kind ballerina mourning the loss of her lover and dance partner. Her cool color palette and long sleeves convey her reservedness, and the criss cross patterns on her clothes create a feeling of restricting emotions
Theta is a passionate ballerina with an outgoing and warm personality who returns as a figure of the afterlife. Compared to the real world, she appears painterly and other-wordly, with freckles and moles that resemble paint splatters.
Animation and Ballet
Emotions are vast and intangible, yet we’re expected to confine them to words that can never fully contain them.
One of our driving philosophies is that emotions are physical and grief lives in the body, and movement is a powerful way to confront and process those feelings of love and loss. Thus we chose ballet as a means for our character to connect to her grief and confront her emotions. We hoped to use the limitlessness of animation to express and exaggerate dance, highlighting the beauty of movement in a unique way.
With the help of professional ballerinas and choreographers, Katrina Allen, Joyce Kao, and Christopher Gonzales. we aimed to explore the intersection of visual and performing arts while paying homage to dance and its role in helping us to confront the deepest parts of ourselves.
