Dusk

DUSK was originally intended as a Source Filmmaker experiment and a so-called warm-up for more projects made inside the Source engine. I did share two blog posts about it and I considered it to be done. I recently realised that there is more potential to be found within DUSK. Within no time I managed to visualize a experimental short with it. Considering the arena of the shot was already highly interesting and perfectly usable for the narrative I came up with, I decided to follow up on the 10 second 'mute' shot of a camera zooming in from inside a car on two zombies and to make it a 45 second experimental film. The original name for the film was INFERNO, but literally five minutes before upload I decided to call it dusk. Dusk, as in twilight. Twilight, as in limbo; between the stages of death, alive and infected.

The film takes place in the truck depot finale of the original Left 4 Dead. I had to recompile the map as originally Source Filmmaker had a bit of an issue with properly reading the map. All of the lights had to be taken out, together with a couple of other entities. Once the map was loaded and I had picked a spot, I could start making the shots. I added fire particles inside the building, blinking volumetric lights in the traffic lights, many props such as the car, the traffic lights, pallets and of course the zombie models. The zombie models were assigned some of the walking animation sequences that were found in the game. Lighting was done with a combination of spotlights and volumetric lights. More information about the lighting can be found in my two previous posts about my Source experiments. These contain a couple of screenshots of the entire project in question.

I extended DUSK by duplicating and cutting the shot found in the original animation, and adjusting lighting, props and models accordingly to fit to my liking and deleting assets that were not required for that particular shot. Production took around a week for all the shots combined, rendering idem dito as they were also rendered on 4K resolution. The audio scape was made with only game sounds found within Left 4 Dead 2. I extracted these from the game with GCFScape, a programme that allows you to read and extract vpk (valve package files) and their contents.

If you pay close attention, you see mentions of depthmaps in this film. That is because the Source Filmmaker also has a option built-in to render the corresponding depth of field map alongside the original shot. That's all I am going to say about that for now. I will most definitely do more with this in the future.