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 :)
8 Comments
I have a 3 year old son ... his name is Jorel!
Seeing this short film made me think of it.
Very tasteful at home aspect.
Thank you!! The film was based off of my 7 month year old son :)
What is your YouTube? I really want to see your videos on your process for this!
Thank you! First episode on the process comes out tomorrow actually. Here is the link to my channel! https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVF9Fzb1Glvu1G0sRK60Hvg?view_as=subscriber
Very professional and cute job!
Thank you! Appreciate it :)
Very good!!!
Thank you so much!!