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There's No Place Like Home

A 3D film shot from outside a window on a Christmas evening, about the view and the distance it holds.

There's No Place Like Home

A 3D film shot from outside a window on a Christmas evening, about the view and the distance it holds.

Project

Personal project, 100%

Period

December 2022, Seoul

Tools

Cinema 4D

Octane

After Effects

Marvelous Designer

Role

Concept

3D & Simulation

Lighting

Editing

Overview

Challenge

01. Vantage Point

Outside,

looking in.

The camera stays outside the window for the entire film. There are no interior shots and no camera moves. Warmth turns into longing because the viewer never enters the room.

Decision 01

02. Concealment

Lace curtains,

half-drawn.

Lace curtains cover most of the window. The room appears only in fragments: a table corner, the edge of a tree, the flicker of a candle.

Decision 02

03. Absence

No one

in the room.

A set table, two wine glasses, a tree decorated with care. No one is in the room. The scene feels prepared, then left alone.

Decision 03

Snow

The snow had to read in two ways at once: light and translucent while falling, then heavy and solid where it gathered on the window frame and sill.

Instead of building the piled snow as particles, I made it as a mesh volume with Cinema 4D Volume Builder. Under an 4GB VRAM, this kept render time and memory inside a workable budget while letting light respond consistently across the surface.

Curtain

The lace curtain had to be thin, translucent and responsive to wind. Cinema 4D cloth could not give the scale, drape and reaction I needed for this material.

I moved only the curtain into Marvelous Designer, a tool I used for the first time on this project. I built the 2D pattern, stitched the seams, simulated wind, then brought the result back into Cinema 4D for final lighting. The curtain hides most of the room while giving the frame its only continuous proof of weather outside.

Results

Audio Bottega

James Micheli, co-founder of Audio Bottega in Lucca, Italy, reached out after seeing the film. The studio is known for original scoring work for commercials by MINI, Garmin and Rudy Project.

He asked for the source file in .mp4 1920 x 1080 and whether the piece could be licensed for the motion design market. The project stayed personal, but the contact mattered: someone who listens to moving images for a living saw enough potential to ask at source-file level.

Audio Bottega · Lucca, Italy · January 2023

Final Thoughts.

Most of the decisions on this project were about what not to include. No interior shots, no people, no full view of the room, no camera movement. The film works because it stays still and stays outside.

The technical choices, volume-built snow and Marvelous Designer curtains, were made to support that restraint. The tools matter only because they made the simpler idea possible.

Home

Sydney Hong

Province, RI, United States