Burt and the Wall Children was a short film produced at USC for The fall 2017 semester CTPR 480 class. The film was Written by Tim Schauer, Directed by Micheal Boyle, and produced by Dezi Gallegos and Julia Tang.

Burt lives under an orphanage, and sometimes the children upstairs fall into his walls and end up feral, living in his walls, stealing his food, interrupting his dating life, and causing him no end of stress.

I was the visual effects supervisor and lead artist on this film. Besides the jib shot, there were a number of other big effects that helped bring this crazy story to life. In one particular scene, cracks appear on a hallway ceiling and nails start poking violently through the walls as a crazed feral child terrifies a poor woman in Burt’s house.

The child is neutralized as Burt nails it through the wall with a large knife. Obviously we couldn’t throw knives around on set, so we filmed the knife as a separate plate and I animated it flying in.

During one scene, Burt bursts through a wall to escape the murderous feral children, but during the shoot, most of the the wallpaper fell off the wall we didn’t have enough time to rebuild the wall on set.

I basically had to reconstruct the whole wall using some backup plates we filmed, a lot of rotoscoping, and some CGI smoke to cover up all the ugly parts.

All work on this film was completed using Blender 3D and Adobe After Effects.

As a reminder, always be sure to check your walls for feral children from time to time.