TITLE: Citizen Kane Scene Remake
YOUR ROLE: Director/Lead VFX Artist
MEDIA: Visual Effects
SOFTWARE: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Garry’s Mod
Hardware: iPhone 12
DURATION: 0:20
CLASS: FMX 322
PROFESSOR: Javier Olarte
SEMESTER / TERM: FA 23
INSTITUTION: University of Tampa
DESCRIPTION: Like most modern films, Orson Welles’ “Citizen Kane” made extensive use of a variety of different visual effects and illusions, most commonly involving matte paintings or other footage spliced with the actual film footage. For the assignment in which we were supposed to recreate one such scene using similar effects, I picked the sequence following Kane’s speech wherein the stage Orson’s character stands upon and the balcony that another character is positioned in are the only actual bits of footage; the rest being matte paintings. After finding a location that almost perfectly matched the balcony and recreating that sequence of the film, I used a sandbox game to recreate various elements of the matte painting alongside using 3D models to replicate the various people on the stage in the original clip itself. After using Photoshop to crop these images, I used a mask to crop out only the balcony and myself before assembling all of the images I had made together to near perfectly recreate the original scene from the film!