Happy Birthday (2007)
Yang Fan is having a bad day. His girlfriend dumps him on his birthday, and he is isolated by American college culture. But this birthday will be a special one; for he meets a stranger, an outgoing girl that seems to have only too many friends around, who shows him that he is not alone.
Official selection for NPAR 2008, as a part of the Annecy Animation Film Festival in France, under the title Yang Fan is Born.
Watch: film festival release | original release
Original release:
Running time: 10 minutes 56 seconds
Language: Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles
Original credits
Written, directed and edited by: Danny Yuxing Huang
Starring: Hai Zhou and Cindy Sin Man Fung
Additional credits for film festival release
Produced by: Morgan McGuire
Visual effects supervisor: Kyle Whitson
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Detailed description
Yang Fan is having a bad day. His girlfriend dumped him, no one remembered his birthday, and is isolated by American college culture. But maybe this birthday he will awaken from the self-imposed exile youthful pathos.
This story of touching and occasionally comic redemption is a collaboration between the student film club (Purple Valley Films/Rain-Stars Pictures) and Computer Graphics lab at Williams College. It was created as an animation test for combining new digital effects with real footage. The film casts emotions as moving paintings and intercuts them with rough, disorienting footage of the compressed social interaction of college life. Of the 120 shots in the film, 75 have custom programmed “painterly” effects designed to emphasize the water and nature symbols that depict the inner state of the characters.
The film was shot directly to digital video at Williams College on a short two-day schedule in 2007. Post production took about two months to build the custom rendering effects, manually adjust parameters and effect code for every scene, dub all dialogue, and build the foley track.
The painterly effects involve selective detail reduction, saturation and tone adjustment, canvas texturing, coherence, pigment flow, and pen outlining. The effects were designed in the GLSL programming language so that they could execute on graphics accelerator cards. This allowed technical artists to change scene parameters interactively and made it possible to render the entire film in HD in about an hour on two computers for daily screenings during post production. This technique cut production time substantially and encouraged experimentation.
Project description written by Morgan McGuire.