LWIta.com - Shapeshifters project

Chestnutwood Productions is proud to present the Shapeshifters project

Shapeshifters is an Italian project for a short fantasy movie of 10 minutes, with the intention to establish a good and solid base for a longer project, a complete fantasy movie, done in the "Hollywood way" but with few resources.

The short movie represents the first part of the entire project and storyline. It will be however viewable as a standalone, so that our little production house will be able to make it available to different contests around the world. Plans are also in the works for a dvd edition of the short movie with production stills, screenplay, storyboards and tutorials about the making of. The 2nd phase of our project is to complete a feature length fantasy movie.

Shapeshifters- the story.
Nadja (Florinda Ghibaudo) is the daughter of the king of the Shapeshifters, a race of wizards able to shift their shape at will, partially taking the shape and phisical attributes of various animals.

The girl is busy reading some important notes and documents as a "Breath", a creature from the elemental plan of Air, takes shapes and attacks her. This forces her into a desperate and rocamboloesque escape from the castle. During the escape Nadja is attacked by other elemental creatures, fire and earth monsters, untill she is saved by an unexpected ally. From here, the story follows Nadja's escape, while the princess attemps to understand what's happening in the Shapeshifter's realm.

The Shapeshifters
The Shapeshifters are a wizards race, able to magically change their appearence into any number of different animals. They have a double nature, eternally suspended between animal instinct and human rationality. They are natural predators and conquerers, now in danger of extintion. After the elemental wars, they are slowly learning how to rule their instinct to have a more rational and illuminated attitude towards political and social living. After the Shapeshifters won the terrible war against the Elementals, 50 years ago, they had to limit their powers, imposing to themselves the "Vow of Shape Keeping." which keeps them from completely turning their shape into that of an animal. They also are easily recognizable because of a mark, a tattoo under their left eye.

The production pipeline uses different packages, mainly Newtek Lightwave 3d for modelling, animating and rendering purposes, but also Z brush 2, Adobe Premiere, and Adobe After Effects.

Chestnutwood production:
Born in october 2004, Chestnutwood production is a little production studio , formed in S.Margherita Ligure, (Genoa) Italy by six good friends, passionate about action and horror movies, CGI and fantasy. The company was formed after analyzing deeply the italian movie production situalion, which is not competitive with american one. Since we are all very passionate about 3D content and multimedia creation, we thought we could make a difference and produce this short film.

For more information about this project you can visit the Shapeshifters website :