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The Lost Bird | Fantasy Short Film | New York, NY

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We, Elizaveta Gaevaya and Joann Fernandes, are both Computer Art majors in School of Visual Arts, in New York. Currently in our senior year of college, the both of us are working on our final project which is a short live-action film.

Our story is about a young girl who is tasked into procuring apples for her mother from a magical forest. Along the way, she finds a mystical flower that distracts her from her way back home. In taking the flower, she finds herself lost and is confronted by an old witch inhabiting the forest. She soon uncovers that the witch is a long lost princess cursed by the forest for doing the same deed as herself.

We created this story with the wish of bringing back memories of our grandmothers and mothers telling us stories from when we were infants. It is a story that is loosely based off an old Russian folklore called the ‘Baba Yaga’. By creating this film, we redevelop all of the stories, legends and myths that were told during our childhoods. As we both love anything and everything to do with fairytales and adventures, we decided that it would be best fitting if the footage was shot in a forest-like environment with a young girl in a red dress. The genre of innocence, being so widely spread throughout the stories, has always captured our imaginations and made us curious enough to make a short of our own.

Since our film is a live-action short, we have on-set footage in combination with 3D elements. Elizaveta is responsible for set dressing, modeling, as well as texturing all 3D assets. As for the post-production components, Joann would be the one in charge of aspects such as editing, compositing, and sound edit.

In order to bring our story to life, we worked with a Professional Director of Photography and his crew, who showed great interest in our story and film and without whom we would not have achieved what we have so far. We spent three days in shoot at Riverside Park, Harlem and managed to have our film shot perfectly. Our main challenge was constantly making sure that everything was perfect; always checking up on the costume, the makeup and well-being of our very young main actress, the set dressing for the live-action footage as well as setting up where we wanted our 3D aspects to be.

In conclusion, with the coming of our short’s release in May 2019, our hopes and great aspirations for our film’s future is for it to be a great inspiration to our general audience. We hope that out film will provide a slight escape away from reality and the calamities of our world today. We view this senior project as not only a great opportunity to express our creativity, however also as a grand stepping stone to launching our careers in the Visual Effects and CG Industry.

Website: https://www.instagram.com/the_lostbird_film/?hl=en

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-lost-bird-a-short-film#/

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