A familiar room.
An imagined world.
As a child, I imagined my bedroom as a boat cabin. The flowers and water on my curtains became a landscape outside, making sleeping alone feel safe. The Ferry grows from that memory into a world of giant lotuses, floating petals and quiet passages.
I developed the environment in Blender and Unreal Engine, moving from hand-drawn storyboards to a cinematic journey. Scale, enclosure and movement carry the experience: the familiarity of a room gives way to the shelter of a lotus canopy.
A journey from a familiar interior, across open water and through a sheltered world beneath the leaves.
The starting point was a feeling of security. A boat offered both an interior to retreat into and a changing view outside. The idea of ferrying in Siddhartha shifted my attention toward the journey; an oversized lotus canopy offered a threshold between shelter and open water.
Early storyboard studies. Familiar rooms, water and plant life establish the journey before the environment is built.
The first drawings imagined a literal cabin on a boat. As the world developed, the room remained an intimate opening while individual petals became vessels. The lotus could now provide both the shelter overhead and the means of moving through it.
I built the interior around the bed, desk and window, using domestic references to guide its proportions and objects. Lighting and familiar details make this the emotional starting point; the window introduces the larger world before the camera enters it.
The March environment used craggy, more realistic rock formations. By April, I was exploring faceted mountains and moss materials. These simpler forms frame the water route while the lotus canopy becomes the main spatial presence.
Once the world took shape, I developed how it would move and feel. Weather, swaying plants, ropes, buoyancy and camera animation bring the environment to life at different scales.
Early lighting made the scene bright and exposed. Fog softened the horizon and separated layers of stems, leaves and cliffs; rain brought movement into the air. The result is a space that reveals itself gradually as the camera travels.
Buoyancy tests let the petals respond to the water, while a wind-driven material gives the lotus leaves a gentle sway. Rope studies explored how petals could remain connected to the plants. These small movements make the stillness feel alive.
I tested camera shake and floating viewpoints alongside the petal motion. The final sequence moves between intimate interior views, the scale of the canopy and narrow passages, before opening into a larger grove. The changing viewpoint carries the sense of drifting through the world.
The final poster looks up from the water, letting the lotus leaves fill the sky. It brings the same idea of shelter into a single image.
Return to the filmCreated for Fortress of Solitude, Spring 2025. Additional visual assets and music are credited in the film.
