



For Arev Manoukian, capturing the live action for his elegant short film Nuit Blanche came easy: He filmed two principal actors in four days on a green-screen soundstage in Toronto.

The hard part happened over the next eight months, as the 28-year-old Canadian filmmaker hammered out densely layered digital effects shots culminating in a crushingly effective slow-motion car crash lavished with beautiful breaking glass.

That attention to detail paid off. Within days of posting the four-minute, 41-second romantic drama (embedded above) on the Spy Films website, Manoukian says he got calls from Hollywood agents and managers. He signed with talent agency William Morris Endeavor last month and went on a two-week spree of meetings with studios and producers. “Needless to say, it’s very exciting,” Manoukian told Wired.com in an e-mail interview.

In March, he brainstormed with Wanted director Timur Bekmambetov and 9 producer Jim Lemeley. “I just came back from some very promising meetings,” Manoukian says. “They are interested in producing my first feature!”

As a primer for other tech-savvy filmmakers, Manoukian, who also shoots music videos and commercials, put together a making-of clip (embedded below) that showcases some of Nuit Blanche ‘s computer-generated effects. For Wired.com, Manoukian goes a step further to deconstruct the short film piece by piece.





The Actors

“Our lead actors, Megan Lindley and Michael Coughlan, were shot separately and only met on the last day,” Manoukian says. “We also had about six background actors. We shot them as separate layers so we could place them wherever we wanted. If you look carefully, you can see one of the actors appear three times in the same shot!”

Tech Specs Cameras: DVCPRO HD camera for the 24 frames-per-second live-action shots; high-speed Photron APX for slow-motion sequences filmed at up to 2,000 frames per second.

Effects: “For 3-D we used Maya and mental ray, 3ds Max and V-Ray,” Manoukian says. “For compositing, we used After Effects. The matte paintings were done in Photoshop and mapped in 3-D.”

Editing: Adobe Premiere

Computer: First-generation dual‐core Athlon running Windows XP. Manoukian says: “It is now considered an antique but we still use it!”

The Green Screen

“The green-screen space was too small for the width of the first establishing street shot so we had to shoot some of our background pedestrians walking on a treadmill,” says Manoukian. “We then tracked and animated them walking across the whole width of the screen.”

The shooting schedule was carefully segmented, he adds. “We spent one day for physical elements like the puddle, wine glass and smoke/dirt particles for the car crash; one day for the Woman’s cafe side of the film; another day for the Man’s side of the street; and one last day for the background actors.”

The Virtual Set

“All the street environments and sets were created digitally in post‐production from still photographs that I took in Paris, Toronto and Ottawa,” Manoukian says. “Visual effects artists Marc-Andre Gray and Pat Lau, who are my good friends, took these images and constructed beautiful matte paintings.”

Layer by Layer

“The ‘making of’ video makes it look a lot easier than it is,” says Manoukian. “Marc‐Andre and I had to create almost everything. There was a huge volume of assets, from wet streets to 3-D leaves and cars.”

Shattered Glass

The Nuit Blanche climax involves a slow-motion car crash complete with destroyed windshield. “First,” Manoukian says, “we broke real glass at over 2,000 frames per second on set. Then we realized the only reason you see glass is from the reflected environment. Since the street did not exist in the studio and all our environments were done in post-production, we had to hand-animate the glass in 3-D. The challenging part was to not make it too perfect, so we added some dirt and made sure each piece of glass looked unique.”

Black and White

“We love the millions of colors that today’s screens can display but there are so many shades of gray between black and white that you can create extremely rich images,” Manoukian says. “Because black-and-white photography is inherently pure, it’s a great way to tell a visual story and express emotion. Black and white is more honest and true as there are no distractions.”

The Theme

Manoukian declined to name other movies or filmmakers as influences. Instead, he says: “The idea for Nuit Blanche came from the notion of having a special moment with a total stranger, which happens to everyone, especially in a large metropolitan city. It lasts for a split second, then things get awkward, so we turn away. I wanted to take that moment of attraction and stretch it in a hyper‐real fantasy where things unfold like slow-moving photographs.”

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