Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

First 3D animated short film from South Africa using Blender

3

Clare Louis writes:

We did it! To the best of my knowledge, "Midnight Escapade" is the first short 3D animated film completed using Blender in South Africa. This 13-minute 3D-animated magical fantasy project from new studio, Katanimate Animation Studio in Durban, South Africa ended up taking 17 months to complete because of delays and extensions caused by the Lockdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Backstory

We were working on another project using (other software) but that changed after a trip to my first Annecy Animation Festival a few years ago. While wandering around the market (MIFA), I saw several demonstrations by Andy Goralczyk and Hjalti Hjálmarsson from the Blender Institute that demonstrated Blender's capability - and it was free?! On returning to South Africa, I declared to our young team that we were going to use Blender going forward. Our production supervisor has long been a vocal proponent of open source and she didn't need convincing. We started almost straight away. Most people in the studio had never used Blender but as animators joined the project, they picked it up quite easily -especially after the UI changes from 2.80 onwards.

We joined Blender groups, watched Pablo every Monday, devoured training videos but most of it we had to figure out ourselves as hardly anyone we knew in our animation community was using Blender. From time to time we contacted the developers who were responsive and helpful. That was a pleasant surprise after (other software) ignoring our pleas for direction.

It's been a heck of journey!! We would encourage anyone to just do it! You won't be sorry. Soon we will be working on an animated TV series using Blender. Stay tuned.

 

See the Midnight Escapade sneak peek here:

About the Author

Clare Louis

Owner of Katanimate Studios in Durban, South Africa since 2016. Very recently moved to Blender as the main 2D/3D software of our studio.

3 Comments

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×