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Snowblind Special Effects

23

Blender was used for some special effects in the movie 'Snowblind', a Wreckamovie project.


http://vimeo.com/14891080

Hannu Hoffrén writes;

I work as a video editor and a 3d&vfx artist in my daytime job, but the customer base and the projects over there are focused more on the educational side.

About the movie: I think it is a digital reincarnation of spaghetti western - as in those days, European low budget filmmakers couldn't afford to film in the U.S., so they used Italy instead - today, budget is even lower so Italy gets replaced by a green wall. ;) It has many of the nuances that the old spaghetti westerns have, quite in all aspects of the movie, but I guess the old film looking visual style is the most recognizable for the viewer.

Snowblind used Wreckamovie to gather people to work on the movie and at one point there was a task about rotoscoping and particles and that got me interested joining in the project. At that time I had just started to make myself available more to the movie world instead of my normal freelance stuff, which basically included creating websites and 3d visualizations. Snowblind was a great way to build movie vfx reel as I hadn't had any experience working in any movie before that. Also, Wreckamovie appeared to be a very good tool for networking and I've already met many from there in person, including Kalle Max Hofmann who is such a great person to work with, but also hang around with too.

Even though I didn't get any salary (but some cool Wii-games!! ;) ) from working in Snowblind I already got a _very_ cool movie contact (which I don't want to jinx by telling about it as everything is on early stage ;) ) by showing the material I made in the movie.

- Hannu

Links

Watch Snow Blind:

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.

23 Comments

  1. Hi guys, Kalle Max here - the guy responisble for Snowblind ;P First of all big thanks to Bart and Hannu for posting this :D And thanks for the comments guys! @be2inas: I guess the voters took into account that this is a fan-based, self-financed production which is distributed for free, in the spirit of Star Wreck etc... We really need all the support we can get if we ever want to stand up to the Hollywood system. Today, you can achieve results with Blender that rival the industry's top productions - but when the software was first released, things looked very differently. Same with indie film crews like us, we get better as we go, but without your support, we're dead in the water! So I hope the users will keep up their kindness - things like 80% thumbs-up on YouTube mean a great deal to us! T H A N K S =D

  2. So, the company distributing Snow Blind is called "Mango Film" - The next open movie by the Blender Foundation has the code name "Project Mango" - What does all this tell us? ;)

  3. For the low budget film this looks really awesome!
    Guys, you need a very accurate use of CG. I'm not about trolling here - just want to tell the obvious things (obvious to my eyes):

    - little white snow "stones" near foots are too CG-looking. maybe add some deformations, more random variants (different sizes and forms), some noise on them;
    - overlayed artists on almost all scenes (dynamic scenes) looks OVERLAYED. this obviously caused by wrong lighting of heros and maybe wrong shadows (I looked just one time). You may add another channel in Compositor to "human's" channel - colored lights and additional shadows. it's must be overlayed on rigged transparent CG characters those will be almost copying real actors' forms.

    - (really obvious) hits in humen leaves bloody spots on wear. but blood looks good

    OK, I looked second time :)

    Sorry maybe I'm not really familiar with this indie films theme but I imagined something "a bit other"... like Indiana Johnes FX :)) Yeah, I know - my plank is very high.

    Maybe that "speech"about "overlayed" is a bit harsh. I think that (for sake of time) you need just to adjust gamma and "curves" (contrast, lighting, colours) for overlayed actors so that they will not be looking overlayed.

    Good sides (those are REALLY GOOD):

    - actors' play
    - rotoscoping
    - dynamics in scenes
    - moving landscapes

    Keep up your good work!

  4. @Kale:well ... you need much more effort to beat "Hollywood system". This isnt Sincity or 300. But very impressive try for open movie project. Congrats on that. Besides, you wanted to be critisizes as the first frame of yout movie states ;) It would be nice to see more behind the scene stuff. Especially those done with Blender.

  5. Thanks again guys, sure we are interested in your critique! I know the weaknesses of the comps, believe me... as we were only two guys doing 95% of the shots! We knew how much money we had to survive without paid jobs - about 7 months when we started comping - so we had to churn out 30 seconds worth of final comps every day! We had to stop work on each shot as soon as it looked halfways okay ;P In that sense, Snowblind is not a tech demo but more of an experiment if you can get away with telling a story on halfways-decent looking (aka cheap, *cough*) comps. Like in asking: you have this really very tiny budget, now do you do a film with two people sobbing about their relationship for 90 minutes or can you also do fantastic themes with some action scenes thrown in? We're pretty happy with the result, "yes we can" (hehhe) and I hope the ability to show this film to people now, saying "this is the direction it's going" will help us to get more vfx people on board for the next one - so each shot gets more attention than just 2 hours ;D

  6. Soo....why wasn't this just done without special effects? Please don't take me as arrogant or naiive. Practical always beats Fancy, unless I'm missing something (such as if it was filmed in south africa where there is no snow or something like that) why not use the special effects for something that really needed it?

  7. @Keith: totally fair question! It's mainly the realities of film making that forbid shooting such a film "on location" if you have no real budget. A few examples: In winter, you ony have about 6 hours of good light per day / cast&crew freeze their asses off / equipment takes damage from cold / impossible to guarantee weather continuity (snowfall for example) / danger of injury when shooting in derelict buildings / and so on and so on ;D

  8. I've seen a LOT of indie films. And this looks a ton better than most of them. Sure, there are obvious things where you can tell it was green screened or this effect or that. But over all .. it looks pretty dang impressive.

  9. Not bad. I personally think that sliding down the mountain could've used more work, especially at the part when they begin to go down the slope (which didn't look too convincing), but overall, especially for a low-budget indie film, I say "Not bad."

  10. I agree with Brian L...I think the still frame composites were amazing, but with the green screen it was very obvious the characters were not actually even moving but rather bouncing up and down on a stationary bike. I'm sure if I was sliding sideways down a hill I would be doing a lot more fishtailing and moving to try to keep it under control. If the motion was a little better here I think it would add to the realism, the audience is watching the characters not the little pieces of snow flying everywhere. The goal is to keep the snow realistic enough to not be distracting but have the motion of the characters real enough to keep the audience focused.
    As far as not being able to film in the winter, it doesn't have to be super cold to have snow, and these shots seem simple enough to not need extensive periods of planning time on location. That's why I love older Sci-fi films, because special effects was their last resort, which is what made them so good. But to the participants in the project please don't assume I'm criticizing your work in a prideful way....but the key to filmmaking is making things look real, not using CG to show off how good you can do. If you want to show off then make a movie that when people exit the theatre they say "CG? what CG? Wait, it wasn't real?"

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