Eye candy: Ruin
In a ruined city, a lone biker flees from an implacable robotic adversary.
Although Ruin, OddBall Animation’s beautiful photorealistic short, is over eight minutes long, that’s pretty much the whole of the plot. There’s no dialogue, and in some of the most effective scenes, only ambient sound.
The setting is reminiscent of recent post-apocalyptic videogames – notably, but probably coincidentally, Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us – but perhaps the closest parallel is Steven Spielberg’s debut feature, Duel.
Like Duel, Ruin is lean, pacey and economical.
And like Duel, you’d love to see what the film-makers could do with a bigger budget.
It also looks gorgeous. Just the opening shot of the camera panning up over the ivy-choked freeway to the buildings beyond is enough to establish Ruin as something a bit out of the ordinary.
There’s a lot of interesting technical information on OddBall’s website about how the short was created. All in all, it’s a rather good advert for LightWave, in which Ruin was animated, and modo, in which it was rendered.