Honors Projects

Creating Realism in Fantasy through Visual Effects

Abstract

My project is a self-produced short film that utilizes visual effects to help tell its story. The story focuses on a young boy who has terrible fear of the dark. Instead of facing his fear, he crawls under his covers with piles of books and reads them to escape his fear. One night, he reads a book about a terrible evil knight who throws a kingdom into darkness. While the boy is reading, the covers of his bed fly off of him, and he is on a hillside, with the evil knight’s castle in the distance. The boy has entered the world of the book, and ends up being forced into the castle to face his greatest fear, a personification of the dark in the form of an evil knight.

The theme of the story is that your fears and real until you face them, and then you realize that they are nothing. The boy in the story can only defeat the knight, and his fear of the dark, once he stands his ground in front of the knight. Visual effects work the same way. As long as you don’t look too closely into a movie, visual effects seem real. If a movie is broken down, one can see how everything is put together, and realize that it is all an illusion and a trick. I liked this parallel, and thought that visual effects would be the best way to tell this story.

Department

Theatre and Film

Major

Film Production

First Advisor

Lucas Ostrowski

First Advisor Department

Theatre and Film

Second Advisor

Craig Vickio

Second Advisor Department

Psychology

Publication Date

Spring 5-4-2015

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