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BlenderNation Interview: Darkfall

Bart ·

I’ve featured many of Darkfall’s tutorials here on BlenderNation and thought it would be interesting to learn a bit about the person behind them, and his motivation.

Traditionally, we’ve featured mostly interviews with artists, but I realised there are many other important or well known contributors to the Blender community (like developers, but also tutorial makers), and I’d like to explore this. Please let us know if you find this kind of interview interesting!

Howdy! Can you introduce yourself to our readers?

Hey, my name is John and I run the Darkfall Youtube Channel. I live in England, on the West Coast. Though originally I’m from Manchester.

For a long time, I have been working in office jobs (administration and so on) but I have been working as a Freelancer for a short while. I would love to be able to turn my passion into a career and one day work with Blender full-time.

What is your history with Blender? Do you use it for your daily work?

I have used Blender for many years now. At first I thought it was too complicated and gave up. After watching many tutorials on YouTube, and seeing the amazing things that could be created I decided to give Blender another try. I spent countless days playing around with everything and watching many hours of tutorials.

After a few years of using Blender, friends and family members would ask me to teach them how to use it or how to achieve a certain effect and so I decided to start my own channel.

Potion a.k.a “How to Turn Pages” – This was my first tutorial.

What is your main motivation for creating your tutorials?

My main motivation? It’s always been to help others. If someone finds my tutorial helpful then I consider my job done.

Where do you get inspiration for your tutorial topics?

Good question!. I have an “Ideas” pad full of Short Films I would like to do (eventually). Many of them will require VFX amongst other things. So a lot of the time my Inspiration comes from an Idea for a Short.

Lately, many of my Subscribers have been suggesting tutorials which has been fun. For example the “Star Wars Style Hyperspace Jump VFX” was a suggestion.

I would never have thought to do this effect and though it isn’t perfect I am glad it was suggested.

What does your tutorial creation process look like? How much time does it take?

My process is pretty simple. On average a tutorial can take up to 2hrs. Once I have a clear Idea in my mind I like to test it out a couple of times before recording. Not only to try and perfect the effect but to try and deliver the content in a pleasing way.

I use Blender for pretty much everything!. From creating the actual tutorial, to then Editing the final version. Though editing takes a few minutes, Rendering Animations or VFX is the most time consuming.

Which of your tutorials are you most proud of, and why?

I’m most proud of the “Ink Drop Effect”:

It was something I wanted to do for a while and when I saw how simple it was to achieve I had to share it. At the time, my audio recording equipment was terrible but many still found it helpful.

If you could share one tip with the Blender community, what would it be?

Try everything!

For me, a good way to improve is to try everything. Watch many different tutorials and then try them. You may learn something new or even find a way to improve your own workflow.

Thanks!

You can find John’s tutorials here on BlenderNation and of course on his YouTube channel.

Author Bart
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.
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