Hyperfocal Design
Benjamin Bardou’s short film, Gloria Victis, is finally out now! Ben used VRay’s Sun/Sky system to do some of the earlier time-lapse shots, then Hyperfocal’s image-based, HDRI time-lapse skies from 2:20 onwards. Check it out:
You can also view a preview, VR/360 degree video with some details in my last blog post.
I’ve followed Ben’s work for a while now, and I encourage you to check out his work on his Vimeo and Youtube accounts, which features everything from remastered, old Mercury NASA footage to “made to look old” GTA in-game footage. His work is a mix of moody, nostalgic and melancholy that I really love! My favorite is perhaps Do Computers Dream of Electronic Sheep:
I asked Ben to tell us a bit about these videos:
For the GTA movies, I shot the footage myself. I used some mods (camera & weather mods) to have full control of the city. I have a fascination with cities, especially megapolis like New York or Tokyo. GTA is like a dream for exploration and wandering. For the image process, I capture sequence in live with FRAPS and I use After Effects to create the mood. I make the editing too on After Effects.
My editing process is intimately linked to the city mood. All my work is about editing theory. And that’s why I make movies :). How to connect the collective unconscious to the personnal conscious is the goal of my work.
As graphist (this is my job in the industry) I enjoy to work on the images deeply and to confront them in a full movie. Working on one image is interesting but what is really interesting is the link between these two images you have created.
Basically this idea was discovered with the russian cinema in the 20s.
Here’s another great GTA V video from Ben:
I think Ben’s choice of music and timing is spot on. As a fan of NASA/”space stuff” a lot myself, I also found this quite interesting:
Ben adds:
For the retro/old school images, I think our epoch is stuck in the past, like nostalgic of this brilliant past. Definitely it’s the childhood for my generation (I was born in 1981). For an adult with no future vision (I mean politically in France) it’s easy to get back in the past and hang on familiar things.
You can also follow Ben on Facebook, or check out his website. If you’d like to have a go with the time-lapses yourself, you can download a sunset to dusk sky here. We also have a tutorial for using them with the latest VRay.
Stay tuned for an upcoming making-of from Ben along with an interview on Gloria Victis, how it was made, and his past and future work.
