Exode (short film made with Blender)
Wixie Man used Blender to create the VFX for their short film Exode.
I’ve always been addicted to science-fiction, most of my short films are sci-fi.
When I started writing the script for Exode in 2022, I had in mind a specific location, the Hangar Cassin in Nantes (France), a huge place filled with stuff used by three theater companies, some specific actors which I already knew and that where willing to shoot that thing, and the idea to shoot a story about an alien invasion, a bunch of guys trying to survive and fight for food supplies, and a monster that would scare the hell out of them.
I’ve been a Blender user for quite some years now, and I started gathering free models for this project from all around the Blender sphere, mainly Blendswap and Blenderkit. The amount of great models available there is incredible. The monster was created by a Blendswap user, then rigged by another. Special mention to Chris Kuhn’s awesome aircrafts models (helicopters and fighter jets). Of course, I had to spend a lot of time texturing and lighting these items before rendering any sequence and begin the compositing process. Sometimes even I had to remodel them, like the mother ship hovering over the city of Nantes. The original model was good but simple. I used the discombobulator to make it geometrically more complex and convey a sense of hugeness that was missing otherwise.
It has been four years since I started working on this project now, and spent three and a half years on it on my spare time, from first script draft to DCP. So far the film has been shown in a few festivals. Two screenings in January 2026, two more to come in march. I was lucky to work with three fine professional actors, Nadège Arrouet, Richard Taconné and Tayeb Hassini, all from Nantes, and later on I was lucky to be joined by Swedish composer Christian Engquist who managed to come up with a great orchestral music score.
The production to post production process
I started working on the 3D elements even before the script was finished. The shots of the alien against sunny background were shot on my PC before I even knew the whereabouts of the main characters. This alien was made using Make Human, a free software compatible with Blender.
After completing the first draft of the script, I began making the storyboard in Blender, using makehuman characters again, and modeling roughly what the environment was.
As I shot this film on my own, without any crew, with my camera (a Sony PXW X70) and a microphone, I had to have the storyboard with me all the time. It allowed me to setup real quick and the main shooting took only four days over the course of a year (2022-2023).
For one scene, I even made a previz in blender with a temp score before the shoot :
The Dolly-shot was performed by simply driving my car towards the actor, the camera tied to the front of the car, controlled remotely with my smartphone.
Then I ran some tests:
And here is a VFX demo reel of the first shot of this sequence, final version :
Due to the vibrations of the engine, I had to both stabilize and track this shot before adding all the junk which I found mostly on Blenderkit in 2022. I was using my old laptop at the time, but not long after this I acquired a real good PC with a graphics card and two Teras of hard drive.
And here are some examples of some more very short VFX reels for this short film. Topics are: set extension, reworking light and godrays, rotoscoping actors, masking, animating the monster and camera tracking.
About the film
“The story unfolds in the city of Nantes (France), in a near future. A protest march is about to happen against a bill that allows to capture and detain migrants and homeless people. At the same time, an unusually huge cloud appears above the city, prelude to an alien invasion. Soon, an air battle rages between the air forces and the invaders. As the city is evacuated, a group of people, whose evacuation should have been airborne, finds shelter in an abandoned hangar after their helicopter was destroyed by the enemy forces. Two survivors, a man and a woman, begin their search for food while waiting for a second evacuation. As they explore the abandoned hangar, they realize that another danger is awaiting, far more terrifying. One thing is certain : they did not get there at random. Something or someone guided them here.”
