Recently released animated short film Still Here casts us into a post-apocalyptic future in which the last remaining scraps of the natural world have become a highly coveted commodity – one worth betraying everything you stand for.
The fully CG animated short is produced by House of Panic and directed by Guido Ekker. House Of Panic is the sister label for collaborations of the Amsterdam-based production company The Panics.
The short film follows a man as he navigates a stifling, dystopian landscape in which the wealthy elite, the shareholders of the last surviving nature, would have him weed out a resistance movement growing their own plants. On this dying planet that imagines a collision of the worsening impacts of the climate crisis
and the wealth gap, Ekker offers a chilling image of a future that may not be as far off as we’d like.
“Driven by the exacerbation of the climate crisis and the ever-widening wealth gap, I wanted to create a film that was able to explore both these issues at the same time,” Ekker said. “The film is about imminent destruction, and about trying to survive that. It tells the story of the elite being able to find ways to do so, to live out their days in comfort, whilst the poor must still grapple with survival as a daily struggle.”
Supported by the Post Panic team, Ekker worked with Adobe Mixamo Mocap Data. He collaborated with Kitbash, who provided 3D assests to enhance the film’s visuals. A combination of Ekker’s moving storytelling and his expertise as VFX supervisor at The Panics, his self-directed and self-animated CGI short has already begun generating award and festival circuit buzz. Nominations and features amassed so far include Lift-Off Filmmaker Sessions, Shortcutz Amsterdam, Holland Short Film Festival, and the Miami International Sci-Fi Film Festival.
“Still Here considers questions of human nature, putting that dual potential for either greed or care in competition,” the director continued. “In the world of Still Here, we’ve passed a point of no return. And in the absence of hope, it seems there is only greed.”
Aside from the aims of the narrative, there were several technical objectives and challenges that emerged through the course of the project. With a limited budget and team to create this animation, Ekker had to find creative ways of approaching the project’s CG. “I used realtime rendering in Blender to cut out render times, like you would in traditional 3D animation films, which also allowed me to light my shots from the start of creation,” he said. “Using Mocap Data and Kitbash assets to provide visuals, I found an efficient way to approach filmmaking that allowed for greater creative freedom and faster shot creation that meant I was able to finish the full CG animation within the limits that we had.”
House of Panic has worked on commericial as well as original content. It’s previous projects include the award-winning shorts Zwart and Shadowboxers.