Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Short Film: Nightfall


"Nightfall" by Stuttgart, Germany-based Valentin Schwind

"Nightfall" is an epic computer generated sci-fi film by Valentin Schwind featuring music by Ivelina Nedyalkova.  Incredibly, Schwind wrote and animated all seventeen thousand frames of the film entirely by himself, using 3DS Max 8, Combustion 4 and Premiere Pro.  That one person could create a short this involved is almost unbelievable, especially at a run-time of eleven minutes and thirty seconds.

It would probably be wrong to call this a silent movie, but it could be described as a wordless one.  Not a single word is spoken throughout the story, and rather than detracting from the film, it instead lends the piece a mesmerizing intensity.

There are numerous influences at work in "Nightfall," from with the ring world that seems to have been drawn from Larry Niven's cannon to the Battlestar Galactica-inspired starships.  The final product is entirely original, though. 

 In it, a huge ring world, powered by an artificial sun comes under siege by a dark lord who has fallen hopelessly in love the system's benign queen.  The battle that ensues carries the weight of the conclusion of some greater epic, and it's difficult, as a viewer, not to let one's imagination get carried away with the possible scenarios that lead up to the film.


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