Burning Midnight

Burning Midnight started as a poem, a literary contribution to the Cyberpunk genre—but it became much more. The words inspired a group of us to band together to accompany the text with motion. The goal was to craft the piece entirely in CG, an exercise that we hoped would improve our skillsets in the realm of photo-reality. Though our first attempts garnered us an “A” for effort, we achieved less than satisfactory results. The 3D characters just didn’t evoke the emotional response to match the poetic verse. So we quickly switched gears, called in favors, and threw together a scrappy, green screen shoot to capture our main characters in live-action. With the footage in hand, we re-edited the piece using a mixture of 3D scenes and roughly-keyed footage until we had our final visual narrative. After a lengthy compositing phase, we eventually achieved a deliverable that we felt was worthy to submit to film festivals. Though the making of Burning Midnight (executed outside of our day jobs) was a long and tiresome process, we are ultimately proud of what we’ve accomplished. It has only given us the desire to make another film, and another, and another...