Some Stills From the Short Film

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With the 30-second trailer for REVERSION set to hit the web middle of April 2012, we will begin showing some stills from the final 11-minute film.

The stills above are taken from two separate points in time while the Soldier is exploring the now-abandoned Ethercorp facility.  The danger lurks somewhere in the corridors, maybe even behind the walls...

DIRECTOR'S COMMENTARY:

So now we can finally see how a lot of the things we've been talking about have combined to create the images we are seeing.

I am sure a lot of you out there have noted that there is a distinct "rawness" in the designs and the final look.  This is true to our intention.  REVERSION deliberately pays homage to the raw and rough-around-the-edges look of Sci-Fi films from the 1980's and the late 70's.

This is partially because I grew up in the 80's.  But also because structurally, we wanted a mode of visual strategy where we could "point" the audience to certain things and call attention to certain things and ignore other things.  We didn't want a picture where everything was dialled up to 11.  So there was a conscious effort to ground everything, not necessarily in realism or grit, but to ground it in a way where everything respected a "Limit of Visual Expression" that was sort of a barrier for limited FX in the 1980's.

Our preoccupation with replicating some of these limitations went as far as trying to replicate the look of old films on Betamax through Color Nodes.  We were going to intentionally make muddier images in order to get that effect.

However, after we had seen some early tests of this effect, we decided it was probably better to slightly modernize it by allowing more colors into the picture and making sure the volumes and shapes were clear and more detailed in High-Definition.  This decision is particularly evident in the second render.  Although our replication of "The Betamax Look" was actually pretty successful, it made the picture look dated and bland.

We realized we didn't want to use a direction that hampered our range of visual expression.  Having a dreary look was great for some films like James Cameron's "ALIENS" which really used the visual limitations of the time to its advantage.  You sat there working out what you really saw and what you only "feel" you are seeing.

We wanted the same effect, but eventually we wanted the same effect without having to replicate the limitations of old film and tape.  This is when we started looking at color hues used in Japanese animated films from the 1980's as a sort of adjustment of our intended look.

The final look therefore is something we'd like to think is unique to REVERSION, although it tips a hat to a few older works before the advances in FX that came out in the decades that followed the 1980's.