Animated/rendered/composited in Blender. (Modeling with mixed apps)
Philipp Unterreiner writes:
This short movie tells the story of "Lara Bluhme" a little mechanical flower that one day unexpectedly makes a life-changing discovery. The film is set up as campaign teasing element for the German environmental organization "BUND - Freunde der Erde". It lyrically conveys Laras open ended story and at the same time establishes the tonality for the following campaign. Regarding the overall campaign our team managed to win the gold award as well as the audience award at the this years GWA Junior Agency Award in Cologne at the 22th of July 2011. We are now very happy to present our work in public.
CREDITS
Florian Gerstner: Project Coordination; Character Modeling, Character Rigging, Character Animation; Set Design (Town); Compositing.Simon Authenrieth: Architectural Design & Modeling; Set Design (Town); Sounddesign & Arrangement, Music Instrumentation.
Philipp Unterreiner: Storyboard & Animatic; Character Animation, Camera Animation; Set Design (Wasteland); Music Composition.
Note: Due to the fact that we had to finish the whole animation within 10 days there are some still images left over that we could not possibly finish in time.
12 Comments
Congratulations on the award and there is much to be proud of in this little film. The sets are very well done, the mechanical flower runs smoothly and while i thought some camera moves were abrupt, all is forgiven once it's revealed the project was completed in merely 10 days AND you won the gold! Bravo!
For 10 days it's a great animation. I was looking at it and felt some shots were not as good s others. But then I read about the 10 days deadline so it's understandable.
Was it made with Blender?
This is highly reminiscent of the PS3 game "Flower" by ThatGameCompany (the people behind the hit flash game "Flow"). If you 've played the game you will know exactly what I mean, if you haven't then it's well worth watching a video of it for comparison.
Great work in such a tight timescale and congratulations on the award.
@mookie
" Animated/rendered/composited in Blender. (Modeling with mixed apps) "
Right there under the video.
Wonderful, well done :)
Very nice animation, and the sound track is also great ! Good work !
Hey all of you, thank you for the kind comments!!! I didn't think that the blender foundation would actually post this. I just wrote a mail because i thought - "hey we used blender on this, so why not". Thank you all so much! Phil
fantastic !
but (Modeling with mixed apps)..! why not modeled entirly in blender ?
what apps are you using for modeling ?
The buttefly loop in the beggining is strange because butterflies cannot fly with their body slanted, they always have to fly parallel to the floor. The butterfly loop in the road seems more like a bird fly loop.
Before the fall of the character in the end of the bridge you should announce in some way the inminent disaster, but as you omit it, the drama is minimized or simply absent. A shot of the edge of the brige before would help.
The gear which forms the head of the character should be rusty instead of the shiny metal material you used.
Altough the audiovisual narration is not all bad, the ending simply is not clear and, to my eyes, pointless. A bad end tends to cancel an otherwise good short film
The look is good, and the render well executed. You should plan better the narration before animate it. A good render doesn't solve the audiovisual challenges of a film.
I don´t want to be negative, but I have seen a lot of good comments in blendernation which may turn into a bad way to get better. I hope my comments help you improve your work, disregard them if you consider that they don´t apply to your criteria.
Please visit our website and make any bad comments about our work
Congratulations, it is always difficult to make an animation of the quality you made and it will surely improve with the experience.
@ azrak30: Thank you! Simon did the buildings in Cinema 4D because thats the application he is used to. Florian modeled the Lara-Character in Modo. Some additional modeling was done in blender (like the "real" flower for example).
@oscar andrade: You're definitely making some points there. I know what you wanna say about the mostly positive resonance - and critique is very welcome as it leads to improvement.
Most issues you point out were actually considered by ourselves but couldn't be done better simply because of a lack of time. We had to make many compromises:
The butterfly for example is most of the time animated via a loop as u said and simply parented to a path - because we had no time for more complex animation. Also i started modeling a more complex butterfly with legs and nice wings, but Florian stopped me and said we had no time for that and all we needed were two planes - which turned out to be right in the end.
The bridge scene: You're totally right on this. I always think the same when i watch it. This missing shot was actually planned. I have actually set up a camera in the scene that also closes the time-gap between the shots as they connect right now. but we had no time to animate / render this. we also switched the initial plan from rendering in 720p to rendering in 480p with almost no anti-aliasing to save time.
The rusty head is arguable, but i know what u want to say. We already had a stage where we trimmed Lara down to more recognizable forms - to get the impression that she was made out of the toolbox with screws and higes (for the arm). The chrome-like head doesn't quite fit the character who is considered to be more low-quality / substandard - that's right.
The ending... Yes there is no proper ending, thats a matter of fact. Actually we had planned a whole additional scene which we couldn't realize - again because of the time-factor. Lara was supposed to start collecting tools and scribbeling a plan for the "nature-factory" which becomes the keyelement of the microsite (in the following campaign concept - the movie is strategically embedded into a campaign). We had that scene in the animatic but it wasn't done in the end.
But thank you to point those things out. Its overall pretty clear where the weaknesses are. Its really hard to work under pressure of a deadline. I didn't sleep much in those 10 days. And for next project i want to have more time because we were totally wasted in the end. ;);)
Phil
There are those who know their stuff and those who don't.
You clearly know your stuff.
Well done.
What it all procedural texture by any chance?