UNREGISTERED is a four-shot cyberpunk micro-narrative about identity, visibility and the systems that decide who is allowed to remain visible.
Project Overview
UNREGISTERED is set in a neglected future city rather than a glossy fantasy of cyberpunk. A hooded figure sits alone in an alley among discarded bottles, papers and rubbish. In their hands is a salvaged legacy terminal. The device briefly appears to recognise them, then reveals that this recognition is only the beginning of a refusal.
The final work asks: what happens when a system can see a person only in order to exclude them? The title refers both to an unregistered citizen and to someone gradually disappearing from the social record.
Narrative
For this project, I wanted to tell a short story about a person who is briefly recognised by a system, but is still not accepted by it.
The character is alone in an alley and holds an old handheld terminal. At first, the screen seems to react to them. It shows LEGACY UNIT DETECTED, IDENTITY: UNREGISTERED, POWER TRANSFER … and AWAITING AUTHORIZATION. This makes it seem as if the terminal might work.
However, the screen later changes to AUTHORIZATION REVOKED and RECLAMATION COMPLETE. The character falls to the ground while another person walks past without paying attention.
The story is told in four shots:
- Isolation: the character is sitting alone in the alley.
- Discovery: they pick up and hold the terminal.
- False recognition: the terminal starts to respond in their hands.
- Erasure: the authorization is revoked, and the character falls.
I kept the story simple so that each shot has a clear purpose: introduce the character, show the device, show the system rejecting them, and show the result.
Revised Storyboard
The storyboard focuses on the final four-shot sequence: a lone figure in the alley, the terminal as a possible way back into the system, a close-up of its active screen, and the aftermath after access is denied.
Visual Direction
Blade Runner 2049 was a reference for the pace, scale and lighting of the film. However, I did not want the environment to look too neon or overly stylised. I used wet pavement, rubbish, yellow-green street lighting and muted blue-grey shadows to create a darker and more ordinary urban space.
The colours are kept fairly restrained. The street feels worn and slightly dirty, while the terminal is brighter and more electronic. This helps keep the focus on the character and the device, rather than making the background too distracting.
Shoot and Performance Tests
I shot the character against green screen so that the alley, lighting and device could be constructed and adjusted in post-production. The performance was kept restrained: a person trying not to attract attention, then briefly responding to the terminal, and finally losing the ability to remain upright. Tracking crosses were used as stable references for compositing and camera work.
The hand shot was especially important because it carries the false promise of the story. I first tested its scale and position with a simple physical proxy, then replaced it with a Blender terminal model whose screen animation could move from a faint green interface to a red refusal state.
CG, Compositing and Integration
The terminal was modelled and animated in Blender, including an independently animated screen texture. The CG environment and the practical performance were then combined in NukeX. The workflow involved stabilising plates before tracking, chroma keying, manual roto clean-up, camera alignment, scale and timing checks, and matching the Blender render to the live-action plate.
To make the character and terminal sit in the scene, I used colour adjustment, green-spill reduction, edge softening, controlled defocus, grain and contact shadows on the pavement. The goal was not a perfectly clean cut-out; it was an image with the same softness, contrast and imperfect texture as the background plate.
The final work also taught me that technical fixes must serve the story. A slightly soft edge, a dimmer screen or a darker shadow is useful only when it makes the figure feel physically present and emotionally exposed in the alley.
Editing and Sound
The edit is intentionally slow and observational at the beginning, before becoming more abrupt when the system denies the figure. The sound direction combines distant traffic, a passing car, sparse cyberpunk city ambience and a low lonely drone. After the collapse, the end is held in relative quiet so that the final system text carries the last emotional beat: RECLAMATION COMPLETE / NO RECORD REMAINS.
Reflection
Because of the time available, I decided to focus on four shots. This meant that each shot needed to clearly move the story forward, and I had to make practical decisions about what to keep and what to simplify.
Through this project, I learned how modelling, green-screen keying, camera tracking, compositing, colour grading, shadows and sound need to work together. I also learned that small details, such as matching the character’s colour and adding contact shadows, can make a big difference to whether a shot feels believable.
If I had more time, I would improve the camera tracking further and add more light interaction from the terminal onto the actor’s hands. Overall, I think the final four-shot sequence communicates the idea of a person being recognised by a system, but still being rejected by it.
Final Outcome
The finished film is a compact four-shot final project, UNREGISTERED / 未登记者. It combines green-screen performance, Blender CG, NukeX compositing and an original animated interface to tell a story of conditional visibility and systemic exclusion.