Watch the full short: Quicktime H264 (16 minutes / 64mb)

Heavy steps

This is one of the final scenes. Armando walks home, enters his appartment and the wooden floor starts shattering under his weight. We had no reference pictures from the original location or any sort of measurement. We plainly reconstructed a whole section of the floor, tracked the camera path and comped the fake wood planks.

Elevator interiors model

The elevator interiors were entirely recontructed in Sub-D to allow the director complete freedom of choice for the best camera angle.

Then rendered and animated for a scene in Armando's hotel.

Scale animation layers.

The scale had a very important role in the story. There are two key scenes at the beginning and at the end showing the status and progress of the main charater's illness. Initially the director had two live closeup shots of the scale's dial spinning and the kg counter increasing.
The problem with those live shots was that the dial and the numbers' movement was too jaggy to be readable.
We were required to entirely recompose the shots and reanimate them; we extracted a clean plate form one of the orignal frames, cleaned it up, isolated the dial and rebuilt the double shadows; then brought all the layers in AE for compsiting and animation. Most of the animation has a scripted base with some manual keyframing added later.
The shots ended up being completely undistiguishable from the originals, only better.