Award Winning short created in Blender! – in a week

BrennanKarem writes:

“Fatherhood” is a short film that I directed and animated completely in Blender…and I did it in a week! Recently the youtube channel “Film Riot” hosted a “Stay at Home Film Challenge” giving participants 1 week to complete a 1 minute short film. Ryan recently said on his channel that they got close to 2000 submissions. And yesterday they just announced the winners, and “Fatherhood” was selected as 1 of 3 winners!

I documented and kept track of pretty much the whole process starting from day one, and I plan on releasing a series of tutorial videos showing the break down of what went in to each day. (subscribe to stay tuned) I actually found out about the festival a day late so that gave me 6 days to try and pull this off. But as romantic as this may sound, it was definitely not an easy process, and there were multiple times I thought I was not going to be able to pull this off.

Just to give you a little taste of what is to come. Here are some highlights from my 6 day journey.

• Day 1 : Found out about the contest and immediately knew the next 6 days of my life were going to be rough. Came up with concept, story, aesthetic, characters and started to shotlist and put together my reference photos with pureref.
• Day 2 : Modeling the Dad character. Trying to make him detailed without too much geometry, while tackling the concept of making a robot look like a dad was challenging. This took an entire day and then some. Probably about 30 hours.
• Day 3: This day was completely texturing and lighting and test rendering. I hand painted grunge maps for every single part of this character. I put on some hacking music from Mr. Robot to get in the mood and then turned off my brain to save it for later :D. The second half of the day was completely for the environment. I wanted this to take place at his home. And from the start I had a pretty clear idea of the home I wanted. I wanted to feature a big blooming window that showed some of the city outside. And I wanted that to be a big part of the overall look.
• Day 3 (night) : I continued to work through the night. Texturing and lighting and finalizing the living room. I designed the layout of the room, but used models and textures from Poliigon – shout out to Andrew.
• Day 4 : I could feel the deadline breathing down my neck. I had to start animating. I rigged the robot character in surprisingly about an hour or two. This was a life saver for sure. Day 4 from that point on was complete animating. By the time night came around on day 4 I finally had my first shot ready to render, and I sent it to the farm. (Render street is my preferred farm) Always so nerve racking waiting for that render to finish and hoping it looks good.
• Day 5 : Continued the animation. While shots would finish rendering on the farm, I would download them, composite them in After Effects as quickly as possible and export them to be put in the cut. Day 5 is when things almost took a turn for the worse. At 2am that night (technically the next day) I still hadn’t designed the boy robot….yea… and he’s in a lot of shots.
• Day 6: I managed to get the boy robot done after multiple mental breakdowns. All the shots animated, and took the last few hours to do sound design and voice acting. I finished and uploaded with 13 minutes to spare.

From the start I wasn’t sure if a short film made in Blender could be pulled off in a week. How much time would each task take? Is there any room for error? How do you plan for that? Will I get sleep? Is there enough coffee in the world for this? And also, how much would it cost?

Well I plan on answering every last one of those questions in a series of tutorial videos coming up on my channel. Thanks for reading! Hope to see you over there :)