Art Director
A horror short film that follows an injured college athlete who succumbs to an unhealthy lifestyle, until she finds herself haunted by a mysterious shadow figure.
Supported by National Kidney Foundation (NKF) Singapore
Runtime: 4 minutes | Language: English
‘Run for Your Life’ follows Andrea, a college athlete, and her roommate Adeline, a new addition to the team. However, when Adeline starts to outperform her, Andrea feels threatened. What begins as friendly competition spirals into quiet obsession and self-doubt, and Andrea's mental state deteriorates. She turns to unhealthy habits for comfort, all while feeling an ominous presence creeping closer—a dark shadow that mirrors her growing fear of failure. As the pressure mounts, Andrea must confront whether the true race is on the track … or within herself.
As the art director, I designed the production set, prepared props, and decided on the makeup, hairstyling, and colour choices to reflect varying stages of the characters’ journeys in each scene.
For my art direction lookbook, the set design was the first aspect I worked on, including deciding on the props to be placed on the set and to be used by the performers. The goal was to design different parts of the room according to the characters’ habits. It ultimately evolved from the parts of the room being distinctly separate to being more integrated, with the characters adopting the shared space but with their differences visible. I then moved on to the wardrobe, hair and makeup. Andrea’s dark-coloured clothes throughout most of the film symbolises her depression in contrast to Adeline’s light colours, and Andrea’s appearance is pale and restless while Adeline’s is fresh and healthy. An enjoyable part of developing the initial lookbook is the research, where I could use films in gathering references and bolstering ideation.
After the set design, wardrobe, hair and makeup were fundamentally decided, I got to visit a willing party’s home as the shooting location for the dormitory scenes. Unexpectedly, the room had a bunk bed instead of two separate beds, and I then assigned the lower bed to Andrea as she sinks into worse health and the upper bed to Adeline as she soars in her running. I subsequently designed several digital layout plan options with various positions of furniture, using a one-perspective concept to observe the dimensionality of the layout as compared to an overhead floor plan.
Other designs made were the news post that Andrea sees on social media and the logo of the news agency. I also designed two sports certificates for Andrea and four for Adeline, but they were ultimately excluded and we used just medals and trophies. I was somewhat reluctant to discard them after having designed them over time, but medals and trophies were already sufficient and felt more suitable for sports achievements.
A week before production began, my group and I did our presentation for our lecturers, covering our plans among each of our roles. We then did our mock shoot and I dressed the set at the end of the week.
RFYL Lookbook (Set Design).pdfRFYL Lookbook (Costumes, Hair & Makeup).pdfWe did two days of principal photography that switched among the various scenes, and the art direction lookbook was instrumental in keeping track of the set design, wardrobe, hair and makeup as they evolved throughout the film. Especially on the second day of photography when several shots from the previous day were unexpectably reshot, and scenes were split such that the art direction had to be carried out for a scene, changed for the next, and changed back for the rest of the prior scene. A challenge was resetting Andrea’s table for the scene when she finally cleans it up, when the table was in its third stage when it was the most cluttered. The difficulty was that there were many props placed on the table and the food packaging deliberately ripped and trashed. As this cleanup scene was shot over five times, the set had to be reset while observing the positions of each of them, the angle that they were placed, and the quantity. It was also difficult that the props were dumped as it was a cleanup scene where Andrea puts them all into one bag, so the items became bent and stained. But the set had to be reset exactly as it was for smooth cutting in post-production among the different camera angles used for that scene. It had many moving pieces and was a challenge for every prop to be checked for its condition and position before each take.
In post-production, there was a consensus that the work was inadequate. With the subsequent new screenplay, several scenes were discarded with new scenes replacing them. Per the screenplay, Andrea’s costumes changed from five to seven, and Adeline’s changed from four to six. The wardrobe had to be reworked while still driving the story through sufficiently different colours and shades used. Although additional photography was gruelling from 8 a.m. to 4 a.m., it was satisfying when it was done. The largest obstacle for me was restoring the dormitory set from scratch as the owner’s furniture had to be rearranged once more and the room designed. As the argument scene between Andrea and Adeline was to be kept but the blackout scene was to be reshot, the set had to be restored exactly as it was, which brought the problem of Andrea’s table design again. With sufficient documentation, I tried to dress the set as closely as possible, although certain props we no longer had and couldn't find replacements for.
Original vs. restored set
This Short Film Project was the first official production for me and was enlightening to observe the various roles in action. I enjoyed my role as the production designer and being creative with the design aspects in motivating the story, while still being in line with the director’s vision.
