3Dami 2015 Films

Tom SF Haines writes:

3Dami gives teams of nine students, aged 13-18, the task of making a one minute film in just seven days. They start from scratch, scriptwriting and storyboarding on day one, and end the event with a premiere for their film. They create all of the assets for their films from scratch (we do let them download textures and sounds), vote in a director and producer and use Blender throughout – including for compositing and the final edit.

The above film is the opening of the 3Dami University College London event; this year we also ran at the University of Bath. This was made possible by a grant from the Creative Skillset’s Film Skills Fund, which is funded by the BFI with National Lottery funds. This meant we could transport students from anywhere in the country and put them up in accommodation – the events are always free. We also had a student from Germany and another from Hong Kong.

The event is very freeform, with little formal teaching. We encourage students to teach each other and have expert Blenderheads in the room to assist and provide ad-hoc one-on-one teaching as required. I (Tom SF Haines) covered London, and we had Aidy Burrows (CG Masters) and Chris McFall (United Film) taking shifts at Bath. We also bring back graduate students from previous years to help. There are talks and visits – this year we had Framestore (Won an oscar with Gravity) and Rare (Goldeneye 007) back, and also had Wonky Films visit to talk about the industry.

The films may be short, but so is the time scale: We need resources comparable to a real film studio to make it work. It’s no accident we run at two of the best computer science departments in the UK – at UCL we had a 2000 node render farm (admittedly a shared cluster, but we peaked at using over half of it!) and at Bath a 177 node render farm. We have a custom asset manager designed for use by the students (who make mistakes, so it holds their hands a bit), high end storage and this year distributed a 140 page book unique to 3Dami, that explains how to make a film with Blender.

Given that the students are inexperienced and the timescales incredibly tight these events are one hell of a ride, beginning to end. Problems pop up everywhere, both technical and creative. Despite our experience we still cannot get get a team of students to agree on a good film script every time – two of this years five teams ended up throwing a complete script away. Assets are polished and thrown in the bin. Linking problems cause the Blenderheads brains to dribble out of their ears as they stare in disbelief at a problem that should not be possible. Shots get dropped because someone forgot to send it to the render farm and it won’t be done in time. Despite all of this the students always pull through and get the job done – every team has brought a film to their premiere, though it has on occasion been extremely close! This experience proves invaluable to our students – most of our graduates are still at university, but we already have one interning at Double Negative (largest effects studio in the UK – worked on Harry Potter, Batman, James Bond…).

The following playlist contains all of the 3Dami films from the four years it has run, with the five created this year first:

For more information please visit our website, 3dami.org Every year we have got larger, and the current plan is to double up and run four locations in the UK next year (9 teams, 81 students). We are going to need more Blenderheads to help run events (it’s paid!), so we would appreciate making contact with anyone who may be able to get involved. It is also our intention to expand to other countries, so if anyone can help we would love to talk.