Description
Chronicle of Everyday Life is an old street in the rain with its lights on. It belongs neither to the past nor to the future, but is layered over the fabric of today's city: the crossing has traffic lights and a zebra crossing, shared bikes are parked by the curb, and the buses are wrapped in ads. Yet look up, and an archway hung with lotus and koi lanterns stands at the mouth of the street. Beyond it lies another world: bluestone paving washed bright by the rain, red lanterns strung along the street, and koi-shaped lanterns swimming off the stone bridge, across the water and into the deep blue night. Here the modern city and the old days leave each other in peace, and the warm glow of a temple fair falls on the umbrellas of people coming home late.
The film is a walk through this rainy night. The camera sets off from the modern crossing and passes through the archway as warm orange lights bloom layer by layer through the rain. The wet road stretches every lamp into a reflection, and a school of koi lanterns swims overhead across the stone bridge, tails swaying, like stars that refuse to go out. Rain carries the soundscape, and the noise of the distant fair drifts in softly, filtered by the rain: the world is quiet, but not lonely. The camera moves down the street, crosses the bridge and finally looks back, and the modern road it came from and the lantern-lit street behind share the same frame. This world is not somewhere else; it is hidden on the road you take home from work every day.
It is a gift for everyone going through a hard time: people who work late and step out of an office tower into rows of cold streetlights, people far from home listening to the rain by the window of a rented room, people fresh from a failure who feel the world has left them behind. The name on the archway carries the author's message: every night you get through, someone is getting through it with you, and the lights on this street are left on for those who come home late. The world is vast and the mountains and rivers are far away, but there is always a street, a lamp, a koi lantern swimming under the bridge, waiting for you to come back.
The world began as a piece of concept art that was recognized at the 7th GGAC Digital Art Competition. This time the author turned it from a single painting into a real-time world the camera can walk into, rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with multi-camera Sequencer shots, layered lighting and a weather and atmosphere system, and built with Maya, ZBrush, Substance 3D Painter and Photoshop.
How Tripo was used
The main structure of the archway was generated with Tripo: the gate at the mouth of the street, bearing the work's name, that stands between the modern crossing and the rain-soaked lantern street.
