No Leaving - Short Film

For my Senior Capstone class I wrote and directed my first short film - No Leaving.

For my final project I wanted to take on the challenge of directing and to also add a big VFX element to the film.

In Pre Production I wrote the script, shotlisted, storyboarded, aquired talent/crew, found locations, and scheduled shoot dates.

In Production I was directing my talent and my a crew of around 12 people. This was the biggest project that I had been a part of so far at Stout.

In Post Production I was the editor and I did the VFX shots for the film. I also assissted with the sound design and created synth music using VSTs in DaVinci Resolve.

No Leaving Teaser Trailer

This shot was inspired by the Portal video game. I wanted to put two doors facing each other to create an infinite mirror effect similar to the game.

Raw Footage

My talent opens the door and looks back and forth a couple times. This proved challenging because the timing needed to be the same for both shots to match.

Raw Footage

For this shot I used rotobrush for my subjects and hand masked the inside of the door frames. Then I duplicated and scaled down the second shot inside the door frame. Overall I achieved my goal of creating the infinite mirror effect and I’m proud on how the shot turned out.

Final Shot

In this shot my talent falls into an endless void. We shot this in studio and had him lean back on a chair pretending to fall. In post I garbage matted around him then I crushed the blacks which eliminated any remaing parts of the background.

Raw Footage

Garbage Matte

Final Shot

My talent is running down a hallway on infinite doors. As he runs door fly past him. To create this shot I got a treadmill for talent to run on. Then we dragged the door on a carpet past the camera in two shots, one in the foreground and background. All three put together gives the illusion that he is running past the doors.

I hand masked the two door shots then roto brushed my subject so I could put the backround door behind him. I then used time warp to spee up the over time.

I used a combination of chromatic abberation, fast box blur, and echos to create the blur/warp effect overtop the entire shot.