Chainsmoking Seagulls

Video

Overview

Postcard home from English Bay is a video poem based on the poem of the same name. We aimed to create a surreal satirical video to match the vibes of the poem, and just trying to have fun with what we could create.

Contribution

- Directing
- Cinematography
- 3D VFX

Tools

- Maya
- After Effects
- Premiere

Collaborators

- Jonathon Newman (Editing, Sound)
-  Alyssa Umbal (Cinematography)
- Russel Yuen (Editing, 2D VFX)

Festivals
  • Word Vancouver Festival 2023 - Moving Words in the City
  • REELpoetry/HoustonTX 2024
  • Cadence Video Poetry Festival 2024
  • Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen - Played daily from March 2024-2025

Post-production

I used basic green-screen playblasts to create the seagulls in Maya. This is extremely low fidelity, but it's fine because it's funny.

An advantage of playblasting was that I could import a playblast file in After Effects. If I modified the Maya file and playblasted it again, it would immediately update the video with the new playblast, which made adjusting the project much easier.

If I didn't like the camera angle of a seagull here, I could simply playblast a new angle and it would automatically update.

To create water effects, I learned how to use Maya's Bifrost to create fluid simulations. It was a steep learning curve but by the end I had a much stronger understanding of how physics simulations work in general, including other rigid body simulations.

To create the flooded streets, I modelled the general layout of the street as seen from the camera angle.

Creating a digital street to create water simulation
Water with greenscreen
Overlay with video. The water splashes against the sidewalk.

The pig took the longest to render. Making water look realistic at a large scale requires significantly more computation power.

Test simulation, High vs Low particle count
Rendering the simulation
I love this shot

A Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) takes videos or photos to create a virtual model of a scene. This allowed fast camera movement of the statues that would normally be impossible without expensive equipment. I took hundreds of photos of the location, created a NeRF with them, and used Luma AI to create camera movement with it.

The lines control the camera's path
The sky breaks the illusion that this is a digital scene

To create the particle explosion, I used After Effect's particle system.

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Our group took inspiration in making this film from seagull of noon, which was made for a a montage assignment.

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