Fifty Percent Grey

Fifty Percent Grey is Ruairí Robinson’s debut short film. It features a soldier that finds out what the afterlife is like and deals with otherworldly subjects from a comedic point of view. The short presents a minimalist mise-en-scene, one character, an emphasis on objects and an internal conflict.

Staged in particular versions of purgatory, heaven and hell, conceived with dry humor, the plot evolves in a series of repeated cycles.

The stylized aesthetic with realistic illumination was a pioneering one at the time (2001), as it was the first prominent CG short film to use global illumination techniques to achieve realistic lighting. The filmmaker used an early version of Marcos Fajardo’s Arnold Renderer.

The film’s title, Fifty Percent Grey, as well as the clearly divided landscape through a horizontal line, seems to allude to the images created during the early years of computer graphics.