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Animation: Freddy's World

95

Fabien Weibel has published his animation 'Freddy's World'. A stunning production which I totally enjoyed. Cool job!

Fabien wrote:

Hello,

I have just finished a two-month project ! It is a "short" animation (4min) I made for a future enrollment in a French high school. I would like to share it with blender's community !

There is an official web page. I have also made a kind of logbook where I wrote every steps of the
production and creation of this project:

I would finally say a big thankyou to everyone who participate to Blender's development!

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

95 Comments

  1. The BlenderNation deathray strikes again! Fabien's website went down in exactly 37 minutes after posting this.. I added the Vimeo version of his animation to this post.

  2. Very nice job!
    I'm not an expert, but I think that every step of the job (story, modeling, rigging, camera moving...) is very well done.
    I had a look to your website... very nice.
    I wish you can realize all your dreams, man!

    M.

  3. Really good. Great standard all round.
    I am sure who ever looks at it at the school will be impressed.
    Thanks for sharing and best luck for your future

  4. wow - very impressive!!!!

    Great story - remembers me to Calvin and Hobbes!! :-)

    Good job - wish i had a percent of your skills!

  5. Excellent, really enjoyed it.

    I thought the first bit in the apartment up to meeting freddy in his bedroom was a little slow. The airplane sequence in his imagination was great, just needed a bandana on in the cockpit and although I guessed the plane hitting the damn was going to be his fish tank smashing I still laughed because I wasn't expecting him to be hanging from the lampshade with his expression. The number of times the damn was seen to break was a little too many and maybe the time delay in the dam breaking open gave the viewer enough time to associate the dam with the fishtank, perhaps a bit tighter cutting in that sequence.

    The little touches were great as well like the camera shake when the plane flew very close to the camera.

  6. UndercoverBlenderist on

    Absolutly cool.

    Everything is almost perfectly masterised and it's astonishing you need this to enter in a school... it already looks like a "diploma movie".
    I hope you won't lose to much time in that school learning things you apparently already know. Maybe try to negociate to skip the first (and maybe even second) year !?

    Anyway, très chouette réalisation ! Bravo !

  7. @Bart: It's a good new, my viewcount should have exploded (I can't see the stats now^^). I seriously think to change the bandwidth

    @Pixel81k: Actually, I get the idea after reading a Calvin & hobbes comic ! Mr. Watterson is a great inspiration for me !

    @yellow: I appreciate those kind of comments ! I always try to consider them when I make a new picture/animation!

    @everyone: Thanks for watching this !

    Here are some additional infos that you can get from my logbook:

    -Total rendertime: 284 hours! (= 11 days, spread over 6 PCs)
    -Baking: @ 1024 (15GB of RAM)
    -Total size of the project: 31Go (15,000 files)
    -6000 Frames (4min)
    -2 Months and 8 days of work @ 7h/jours = ~ 400 hours

  8. Hi, Fabien I have put a long comment on your site.

    This movie is awesome. As I had the idea of entering a CG school some years ago (I have given up because of the heavy cost), I have seen many projects done by students at the end of their studies. They were rarely individual project, but instead team projects.

    I have to say that most of them, if not all, were very inferior in quality, compared to your own movie.

    As I wrote in french on your site, I think that these kind of school will teach you the softwares used in standard by the cinema industry, but I'm quite sure that for the pure technics, you already know more than most of the teachers that I have met in the schools that I have visited !

    A big Bravo ! I wish you a great career in the marvelous CG universe !

    Philippe.

  9. @ROUBAL: merci pour ton commentaire sur mon site ! Peut etre peux-tu m'aider? en fait je compte m'inscrire à l'ecole ESMA, ou (carrément) Gobelins en france. est-ce que tu connait l'une ou l'autre ? et aurais-tu des avis à me donner?

    Merci !

  10. This is absolutely amazing. You could almost believe that this was a professional short. To think that one guy did it all!

  11. @Fabien Weibel : Je connais essentiellement Aries et Supcréa qui sont deux écoles réputées sur Grenoble, et j'ai visionné des films de fin d'étude de l'école des Gobelins, mais je ne saurais pas trop te conseiller. Je connais très peu d'infographistes Français, et encore moins qui connaissent Blender. Si tu veux discuter à l'occasion, envoie moi un mail.

  12. @ROUBAL: On m'a aussi parlé de Aries. Ca me plairais assez de pouvoir y entrer ! On m'a dit que c'est une bonne école, et comme il y en a au moins 6 ou 7 en france, elle doit en effet être assez réputée

  13. woww! excellent btw the beginning of the plane flight resembles me to goldeneye and the dam too, it's an excellent work very cool!

  14. Funny and interesting. Some relly great shots with the plane!
    I got a strange feeling of FF7 while watching in. That music, character.. heh, it's just me.
    Great work!

  15. really cool!!! the story is simple but with some humor, adn you've used different techniques, specially in particles (explosion, smoke and fluids) two thumbs up..

  16. Waouw, very very good, a good story, good animation, good rendering, particles, fluids, this guy can deal with every part of a 3D production.

    Chapeau bas.

  17. @Fweibel, What process did you use to create those amazing volumetric clouds in the scenes with the airplane? I have been wanting to animate a camera moving through the clouds in a similar fashion and have had a hard time. This is an amazing movie and all is executed very well!

  18. Very well done Mr Fabien! :) Making a short film is difficult; making a *good* short film is infinitely harder. Even if you're limited by your knowledge of the software, your sense of storytelling is absolutely spot-on, and that's all that matters. I can't wait to see what sort of films you'll be making once you've finished your education; you're already beyond what several of my classmates had achieved after 3 years of study at university.

    You have a very bright future ahead of you, and I wish you the very best of luck. Bonne chance!
    Karl

  19. This rocks.
    Soon I will have the time to sit down, properly learn character and related animation skills, and start making some stuff like this. Awesome parallel story, love the ending!!

    Bonne chance avec tout les choses en trois dimensions!

  20. Whoo not bad =D I was expecting another horrible animation (tbh the quality of blender animations I see around arent so good except for big buck bunny) But was pleasantly surprised =D and judging by the number of people posting I'm not the only one =D

  21. The whole video was very well done, but the water effects at the end were nearly perfect.

    FINALLY, Blender water that does not look like snot.

    :D

    Well done.

  22. How cool :D This is soo in the spirit of Calvin & Hobbes, makes me want to see more tricks of this bad boy ;) So, I guess it works !

  23. 'Two thumbs up'.

    Good animation and a good script.
    Too often one of the two is missing.

    Only thing i can think of that needs some improvement is the explosion. The start of the explosion looked good, but when it ended like it looked like something that had grown on the dam.

  24. Just excellent!
    The music really ties it perfectly together. I watched it three times. Twice for the animation and once just to see how the music was used. When I saw it was all done by the same guy, I was floored. Well done.

  25. Wow, I love it! :) Very excellent. I mean, the inside the plane (cockpit) shots, some facial expressions (the eyes,) the penguin shot was a little too long, the dam explosion could have happened a little sooner, and so on could have been fixed, but as an overall it was one of the best Blender animations I have ever seen - not for it's "perfection" but for it's music, story, ingenious, fun... sure, ED has detail, BBB good animation, and others have a quality for their unique style, but this one is great for the fun of it. :) Bravo, man! :D

    -b

  26. Fabien, very very well done. How long have you been doing 3d, and did you learn on your own?

    I see from your website that you're 19, so you must be applying to a college instead of high school. High school is secondary school (grades 9 to 12). I'm sure that you will do very well in your career, based on this movie.

    Post this to some other sites too, like cgtalk.com especially (in either the finished animations forum or the blender forum there).

  27. First of all, congratulations on the project!

    For me, a good film, whether a short or long one has to spark emotions inside me as I watch it.. in just 4 mins I laughed, panicked, empathised and even got goosebumps while sharing the thrill of flying around in the plane with Freddy! Infact, dare I say it, I think I shared more emotions from this, than Big Buck Bunny and Elephants Dream!!! Freddy as a character is really easy to relate to!

    For me, this is definitely very high up on my list of top film shorts made with blender. If this doesn't get you into that school I think you should go pro and or join the BBB/Elephants Dream team for their next production!!!

    Many Congratulations on a top short :)

  28. Fabien, this is such a wonderful animation! I love the story and all the detail you put into it. Thank you so much for the blog, that explains the steps involved in such an large undertaking. It was very inspiring to see what one person can do who is dedicated and persistant to a project. Congratulations on a wonderful job!

  29. WOW! Just WOW!

    This is WAY above what most people can do in a ONE man team in just 2 months.

    The story is BRILLIANT - and you made the whole thing work, with music and all.

    I wouldn't be surprised if you get a job at PIXAR after this one. Seriously!

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