À L'orée
Animation - VFX
Studio Colora had the opportunity to collaborate on À L'orée an independent short film directed by Maxime Dugas, a Montréal-based artist. The film blends sci-fi and road-movie genres.
Maxime wanted to incorporate a fire scene in a way that was more imaginative and surreal rather than realistic. We proposed using 2D-animated fire with vivid colors to evoke a dreamlike quality.
Selected stills from the film
Below we have added a selection of four still images, to present some context of the mood of the short-film. At the post-production VFX stage of the film, we worked on one scene., image No. 4 where we animated fire on car.
A series of steps where taken to achieve the development of the animated fire.
Fist we received the full short-film from the director, where we focused on one scene, a car parked in a forest. The goal was to integrate burning flames in the car.
After analyzing dozens of car fire references, the video underneath presents our first iteration of the animated fire, made with Animate and After Effects.
The animated GIFs underneath showcase on the left a rough tests we did for the animation of the smoke, and on the right a clean pass for the the line art of the fire. Both where created using the software Animate.
Later, we incorporated the animated fire sequence in the scene without any special effects in After Effects. At this phase, the color hue was still not established.
In the final phase, we opted for an electric fuchsia hue for the fire. Below is the final output of the scene, that was fine tuned and integrated with the rest of film by the color grading specialist.
