1. Environment Design
In Rushing Place, I developed six main environments: a kitchen, an underground station, an underground train carriage, a forest, a city and an office.
These environments not only establish the narrative spaces but also represent different aspects of everyday life.
The kitchen represents the beginning of a daily routine. The underground station and train carriage reflect the repetitive and crowded experience of urban commuting, while the city and office emphasise the fast pace of modern life and the pressures of work.
In contrast, the forest provides a natural environment that visually contrasts with the structured and repetitive architecture of the city, reflecting the film’s exploration of freedom and boundaries.
Through transitions between these environments, I aimed to create an increasingly tense, oppressive and fast-paced visual experience.
2. Environment Development
Considering the time constraints of the project, I decided not to spend excessive time modelling environments from scratch. Instead, I primarily used pre-existing 3D assets to construct the scenes.
This approach allowed me to focus more on composition, visual style and the final rendering results.
During development, I selected, combined and adjusted assets according to the requirements of each shot, ensuring that models from different sources could work together within a consistent visual environment.
For me, environment development was not about creating complex models, but about using available resources effectively to achieve the intended artistic direction.
3. Lighting & Stylised Rendering
Lighting was one of the most time-consuming aspects of the environment development process.
As Rushing Place uses a high-contrast black-and-white rendering style, the final visual result relies heavily on the interaction between lighting and materials.
Unlike traditional realistic rendering, my stylised materials use lighting information to transform surfaces into different black-and-white regions and dithering patterns.
Therefore, lighting not only determines how objects are illuminated but also directly influences the balance of black and white, the density of dithering patterns and the clarity of object silhouettes.
During testing, I found that even with identical materials, changes in light direction, intensity and position could produce significantly different visual results.
Excessive lighting could cause surface details to disappear, while overly dark areas could make the silhouettes of different objects merge together.
As a result, I spent considerable time adjusting the lighting in each environment to maintain strong black-and-white contrast while preserving spatial depth and visual readability.