Desperate to escape her reality, a young woman discovers a program that immerses her in her own subconscious through a myriad of virtual personas.
Between March 2020 – February 2021, I worked with a friend to create an animated short film: PEOPLE PERSON. It’s a fantastic, wild-ride, shifty sci-fi about self-exploration, imagined by Ry Malena of Malena Industries.
Ry Malena began production on People Person in 2019 as a one-person passion project, but as the scope of the project grew, it became clear that more hands were needed. Ry selectively assembled a small, tight-knit team of artists who were not only passionate about the film, but willing to volunteer their limited free time to its creation.
Laurels
Reviews
Reflective Encounters
“Through its cyberpunk vision, People Person takes the concept of planned obsolescence, which forces us to constantly update our smartphones, and takes it to its most extreme endpoint. What immediately sticks out are the types of shots being deployed, which are less typical in animation than they are in live-action. Behind-the-head tracking shots and first-person POV are frequent, foregrounding the protagonist’s subjectivity. This is crucial to the film’s success as a story because there is almost no dialogue, and so by placing such an emphasis on the main character’s perspective, the film is able to develop their personality through visual language.
At times it looks like the film is rotoscoped, an uncanny effect which works tremendously well with the film’s premise of reality-shifting. The idea that the software in cybernetic implants dictates the reality we see means that the film can tease an ill-defined line between live-action and animation. These themes have been touched on before, most notably in Richard Linklater’s rotoscoped adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. But in People Person that relationship to a live-action reality is threadbare, reflecting the protagonist’s own ever-loosening grip. This gives the film, in spite of its lush use of colour, a palpable horror that stabs at the viewer in its conclusion.”
— Cathy Brennan
Filmmaker Q&A
A Q&A with filmmakers from the Digital-Dystopia programme at Encounters Film Festival 2021.
Filmmakers - Ry Malena (People Person), Liesbet van Loon (Monachopsis).
Hosted by Kieran Argo, Animation Programmer
My involvement
Starting around 2017, my interest in 3D design began to grow significantly, due in large part to Microsoft’s Hololens. After getting a chance to use Hololens 1 in 2018 and Hololens 2 in 2019, I started to see so much potential for Hololens, not only in the productivity realm but also in the entertainment world as well—a land where Malena Industries is swiftly setting up shop.
I joined Ry Malena in November 2019 as a story consultant, and soon after took on the role of Assistant Director and Production/Environment Designer in March 2020. At the time, I had never designed anything in a 3D program, but since the film had to be made regardless of my knowledge or experience, I downloaded Blender and Unreal Engine, consuming countless hours of YouTube tutorials and spending every extra hour I could spare learning and creating.
The entire film was shot live action, and the actors’ performances were hand-animated using rotoscope techniques to ensure that every micro-detail of emotion and expression was captured. This character animation was then composited with environments built entirely in Blender. Because there are no tutorials on compositing frame-by-frame 2D rotoscoped animation with 3D rendered scenes modeled, shaded, lit, and rendered in a 3D engine, we had to build a bespoke production pipeline from the ground up tailored to that style of animation. We spent our time during the C19 lockdowns working for hours every night after our full-time jobs to muscle and finesse People Person into existence, and we couldn’t be more proud.
