Video Series: Robbie et Moi (Robbie and I)

Wixie Man writes:

Robbie et moi (Robbie and I) is a mini web series in three episodes I made with Blender in 2021. My friend Tayeb Hassini and I where looking for an idea to make a short with one actor and a 3D robot, and it ended up being a mini serie about a grumpy lazy robot making its human owner's life a bit more complicated.
Once the scripts were done, I began storyboarding in blender using a makehuman character and the robot's model.

The models involved (see end credits) were dowloaded from blendswap, then customized and retextured using the blenderkit addon material library.

Once the storyboard established, we went on set and did the lighting together with a few leds and shot with my Sony Pxw x70 in 4K resolution . Half a day was necessary to shoot half an episode.
The most dificult part was for the actor Tayeb Hassini to know where to look at when talking to Robbie. I had to ask him to play Robbie's part as well when she had specific movements to perform, so that I had a reference to animate her afterwards. During pre-prod and production process, it was just the two of us.

With my small laptop, it took me about 2 months full time to finish an episode.
First, I made a pre-edit with all the empty plates, using the proxies from the Pxw for faster preview.
Then I asked Anne Morineau to record all of Robbie's dialogues. This part was done remotely, via emails. Only then could I export every shot in PNG 4K, add the robot animation and do the compositing. I used Eevee for all renders because it is so much faster.

It's far from perfect, but it's the best I could do with the tools at my disposal.
I also made a translation of all dialogues and added english subtitles to all three episodes on Youtube so everyone can understand.

I hope you'll enjoy it.

Episode 1 :

Episode 2 :

Episode 3 :