Sintel speaks about her experience on Sintel

Bart · August 6, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBobq1LULEs

(Animation by Beorn Leonard, Audio by Sintel voice actress Halina Reijn)

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 Community Lead at n8n.

50 responses

MerovingianBee

6 August 2011 at 19:46

She looks so natural there. Kudos for the VA too :)

Gottfried Hofmann

6 August 2011 at 19:57

Hehe that’s funny!

tweak

6 August 2011 at 20:28

Man… Blender internal looks so cheap…

but the animation is great !

amcam

6 August 2011 at 20:28

Excellent but somehow it’s not quite natural.

Jorge

6 August 2011 at 20:53

it looks nice, but she is opening her mouth too much, that’s why it doesn’t look quite natural. but the animation is great. yeah, render internal is not the best to do the job.

Ravish Malik

6 August 2011 at 20:56

mocap?

AlexDS

6 August 2011 at 20:58

:))) very cool ;)

Vladimir Mejia

6 August 2011 at 21:12

Beautiful, i love her.

Turcotte

6 August 2011 at 21:39

Awesome idea… “behind the scenes” type thing – I noticed more a little oddness in hand movement, like when she makes the motion for scissors, but overall it’s super – made me grin. Good audio. Dunno why people are hung up on the rendering engine, it certainly looks fine – it’s nice that it still has a little bit of a cartoony feel instead of making the mistake of trying to be TOO realistic and then having that compete for importance rather than the animation and content. Like, take a look at The Incredibles – some of it is photo-realistic, but a lot of it is somewhere in-between photo and cartoon. Anyhow – nice!

Jan

6 August 2011 at 21:43

Well done!

Rhysy

6 August 2011 at 21:52

I’d like to hear from Scales… and maybe Emo and Proog too….

Chrome Monkey

6 August 2011 at 21:55

“Don’t fall under the dragon, Emo. It would crush you to a pulp! That’s your goal in life, Emo? PULP?!”

Chrome Monkey

6 August 2011 at 21:55

(subscribe)

filip

6 August 2011 at 22:06

I see Judie Foster in her.

Tuuba

6 August 2011 at 23:15

hahaa!! That’s cool! It’s shadow catcher, isn’t it?

AlekB

6 August 2011 at 23:30

I have wanted to do something like this with suzanne.

dat

6 August 2011 at 23:57

it’s good to know that she was acting and Scales wasn’t dead :)

Andreas

7 August 2011 at 00:58

Ohhhhh soo nice, cool, good work, funny idea, well done.

one point of dislike from my side of view……..to short.
could have more of it.

but well. cant have anything
regards and Grats

and Thank

Andreas

Luis

7 August 2011 at 02:32

Demasiado bueno,

Saludos desde USA!

7 August 2011 at 03:06

awww! poor actors. They have to surrender all their rights to the smart computer people…
I feel sorry for the actors…and happy for me!!!
JK

NateTheGreat

7 August 2011 at 03:36

Hah! Why didn’t I think of this? That was cool. Good job man! I agree we need more of these now. Lol

Reekdeb

7 August 2011 at 03:42

Cool! nicely done.

blenderpro

7 August 2011 at 04:29

Awesome!

Pawel

7 August 2011 at 08:30

I disagree that Blender Internal looks bad here. I think it looks really good, realistic enough, I’ve seen lots of ‘pro’ animations that didn’t look any more realistic – anyway, I don’t think real photorealism is the goal here – or should be. It looks like a modern 3D animation – which it is :). You know it’s 3D, no-one’s pretending it’s not, but it doesn’t “scream CG”.

Pawel

7 August 2011 at 08:36

To add another cent, why are many people so obsessed with bashing Blender Internal? For animations, it’s the only option – and will be for a long time, as I don’t expect the likes of Cycles or Lux to be animation-ready for quite some time. And with good skill you can do a lot. Maybe it’s those that lack the skill or don’t want to put in the effort, who are most critical – they’d expect to put an object here and an object there, and get a photo – or a movie! I hope Blender Internal will not be dropped, but developed instead. Unless you’re prepared to wait 12 hours to render a decent frame containing a glass material in Cycles, until most of the grain has disappeared.

Aldi

7 August 2011 at 10:36

Perfect!

Bernard

7 August 2011 at 10:49

Cool idea, she’s really cute :-)

Beorn

7 August 2011 at 11:50

Wow! I didn’t expect to see this up on Blender Nation.
This was just a throw away thing I did as an animation exercise. It was intended for sharing amongst friends, and maybe if it turned out well, my show reel (as it is, I probably wont put it on there). I spent maybe an hour or two on the set and lighting.

So quit bashing the BI renderer!
(blame the operator!)
:p

Thanks for the nice comments everyone.

jwrl

7 August 2011 at 13:50

Who’s voice is it, Beorn?

jwrl

7 August 2011 at 13:51

Forget it! Just read “Audio by Sintel voice actress Halina Reijn” – funny, though!

JG Loquet

7 August 2011 at 14:00

hehe ! excellent !

arkady

7 August 2011 at 16:34

That was actually pretty good. Like others, I wish it had been longer.

Raimon

7 August 2011 at 16:49

Hi,

It seems nowadays it’s a cool trend to blame on Blender internal renderer: from time to time here comes the chance to blame on certain things about Blender, as if they haven’t been in this way for years without a complaint. Those people doing so seems to ignore that good renders are not only a matter of the render engine, but more probably about the mastery of the artist in lighting things.

I like so much using render engines (like LuxRender and so) that simplify enormously light setups. But I’m not naive enough to think that I can ignore all about traditional lighting techniques and throw all the shit to the Render engine’s fault.

Being this animation one in which I don’t think the render issue arises for its poor quality (it’s simply and perfectly ok), I agree with Turcotte that a photorrealistic render wouldn’t helped the overall result.

Regards,
Raimon

Zinc_Chameleon

7 August 2011 at 17:16

A great argument about how photo realistic rendered animations should be. If Pixar has decided not to pursue photo-realistic humans, we can all breath easier. As to the internal renderer, it’s quite fast, and good enough. If you look around this site, you’ll see news on major upgrades to the renderer…but..they require much better hardware, especially your GPU, and integration of new graphics technologies. Better to fine-tune the internal renderer with skill, rather than always jump to a new product. And…wait a minute!–you can do very nice rendered animations with Yafaray.

ROUBAL

7 August 2011 at 20:09

Very nice animation. I like 3D character interviews since I saw Kaena interviewed in the making of Kaena movie by Xilam studio in 2003. I attempted myself to create an interview of my character Elisabeth Warfield, but my own skill in character animation and lipsynch is rather limited. Some movings of Sintel are very close to Kaena expressions !

Great work ! congratulations !

acro

7 August 2011 at 23:09

fantastic! Beorn is too guarded and protective if this was only meant for a small group of friends – it’s fun, and I think it would make an excellent addition to all the Durian content. How come it’s not been up on the Sintel site?

Andy

8 August 2011 at 00:58

I like this.

jwrl

8 August 2011 at 01:25

The lip sync isn’t the key to the believability of this; nor is the render engine. What does it for me is the body language. Anyone can do technical animation, but here Sintel LIVES.

That’s real skill.

thomas

8 August 2011 at 03:10

i’m guessing the animator used a live actor wearing a black suit with sensors on strategic spots just like they do in the movies.

thomas

8 August 2011 at 03:13

i’m guessing the animator used a live actor wearing black suit with sensors on strategic spots just like they do in the movies.

Ovidiu

8 August 2011 at 09:43

wonderful… but isn’t supposed to be the old Sintel giving the interview? :D

JeroenM

8 August 2011 at 10:09

Love the animation. I’ve watched this one over and over again.
@ Beorn:Where did you get the soundbite of Halina Reijn? You should send it to her. Guess it’l give her a good laugh too,
@Ovidiu
Neeh. The aging of Sintel was al done with make-up. This is the movies remember?

jwrl

8 August 2011 at 12:28

@thomas: the term for what you’re describing is motion capture or mocap. However Beorn said “This was just a throw away thing I did as an animation exercise.” – I wouldn’t have thought there was much point in using mocap if you wanted to do an animation exercise.

Beorn

8 August 2011 at 12:33

Thanks all. Once again, this was just an exercise, and a bit of a laugh.
I’m glad it’s been received so well!

JeroenM: The sound bite is from a Halina interview I found on Youtube. (She’s not actually talking about Sintel – we never heard from her what she thought of it)

I got the basic gestures from her interview, but it changed a bit as I animated.

JeroenM

8 August 2011 at 12:56

#Beorn and the rest
Yup! I found it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lbOUYnwrLk The sound bite is between 0:52 an 1:15
Great fun to compare Sintel and Halina Reijn. And I think you did a great job capturing the essence of Halina’s gestures amd expressions and translate them to Sintel

joeri67

8 August 2011 at 15:25

@Pawel:
Most movies are made nice in post. There is no way any movie will use the actual filmed or rendered output.
This makes a one-man-show always hard and comments harsh.

I read a single frame om transformers2 took 72hours to render, lol.
” If you rendered the entire movie on a modern home PC, you would have had to start the renders 16,000 years ago (when cave paintings like the Hall of Bulls were being made) to finish for this year’s premiere! ”
So, yeah, hooray for BI.

Fun anim. The chest is doing weird things though. Is she breathing at all? But fun.
Makes me wonder if Halina saw the movie at all.

JeroenM

8 August 2011 at 19:01

@joeri67
To be honest: 72 hour of rendering time sounds kind of average to me. Over 10 years ago Treebeard took about 78 hours per frame. And Weta had tons of TB’s both in ram and in storage plus the CPU’s to run the lot.. Their renderfarm wouldn’t fit in my apartment. (Granted, I don’t have a large apartment but still). I have this feeling that as soon as the techies come up with new solutions the creatives already figured out how to exhaust them.

oyster

9 August 2011 at 15:58

Is she too nervous before this interview that she did not sleep well? Her eyes are all black

FussyPenguin

13 September 2011 at 10:20

It’s a nice idea, I like it, but with a rather unsatisfactory realization. The skeleton is poorly defined (look at her right armpit and the shoulder). Hands are a bit too stiff too.
I know, I know, it’s way too easier to criticize than do it, but I have to tell what’s my impression.

Julian

8 October 2018 at 01:33

I know this is a late comment but the YouTube link doesn’t work because the video is no longer available.

Is it possible to reupload it?

50 responses

Leave a reply Cancel