Inside SJOR: A Two-Person Pipeline for a 17 minute cinematic short

We interviewed Stavros Fylladitis, designer and technical artist behind SJOR, to discover how he and his brother, Antonis, managed to pull off this ambitious project alone.

Greg:

SJOR is a highly impressive, ambitious project for such a small team, and it seems like this is just the start! What made this project actually possible, when compared to traditional, bigger-budget indie films?

Stavros:

Yeah, many factors played their role in this.

First of all, it was our motivation to do something like this. Antonis and I are big suckers for films, and it’s been our life’s dream to create something of our own. We’ve worked on Hollywood’s blockbuster films, but nothing could scratch that itch of making something that you have total control of and call your own. So that alone was a huge power pushing us forward, giving our 150% and working for a year almost non-stop.

Secondly, I would say it was a combination of our collective experience with the latest 3D that are out there. Antonis has been in the industry for 22 years now, if not more, and I’m on my 17th year. We’ve been through a lot, and we’ve learned a lot through many roles over all these years. Combining that with all the crazy tools that we have nowadays (Blender with all its add-ons, UE5, mocap solutions), and also with the knowledge that is out there at our fingertips, it makes us work super fast, and we feel that we can kick out some decent work way faster than before.

That helped us a lot when Antonis was preparing the script and story. We knew what we are good at, but also our weaknesses. We had to be smart about what to avoid and where to focus.

Greg:

That’s a lot of experience! Is this the first time that you made a film that is fully your own?

Stavros:

Our first experience was in 2018 with PROTEUS [see below] when we first started to work together under the Floating House name. We were mostly focusing on the technical side of things and demonstrating our abilities then, but the passion for storytelling was there even then.

Then we did our fan-made version of Superman in 2023, and that opened the cinematic door for us and gave us the confidence to start working on SJOR. So yeah, it’s been a while since we’ve created something of our own, and it’s an amazing feeling.

Greg:

You and your brother seem to make a good team then, working with each other for so long. How are the responsibilities generally divided? Do you manage to keep your roles separate, or is there a lot of overlap?

Stavros:

Usually we keep them separated. There might be an overlap here and there when one of us might be overwhelmed, but usually it’s Antonis preparing the pre-production, which is going to establish the story, art direction, direction, storyboards, etc, and I will start preparing everything that has to do with concept design, assets, and mocap data. Once Antonis has those, and maybe even earlier, he will start to dictate shots by setting up the camera, environment, lighting, etc., up to the final pixel that we will deliver. Each one of us, of course, tries to excel in what we do best, but we also learn and experiment with new stuff in every project. It keeps it interesting 🙂

Greg:

That’s a smart approach! What did you have to learn or experiment with in this project that you hadn’t encountered before? Was there anything particularly challenging or more difficult than you expected in the beginning?

Stavros:

Ow my god, we’ve both learned so much that we feel we are different artists after this one. You might feel confident with something, but once you have to go through sooo many shots, characters, environments, different kinds of scales for each sequence and different lighting conditions, all to be able to run in real-time… you are starting to question many things that you thought you knew.

For me personally, it was everything that had to do with characters. It was my first time designing characters, having to edit the mocaps, and for some shots, hand key- animate them.

Antonis had a lot of unexpected surprises transferring the script to an actual 3D film. It was a new experience to see that some points in your script sound great, but once transferred into the film, it doesn’t work and you have to find your way around.

Greg:

Apart from learning character design the hard way, would you say the scope was under control throughout the project, or did your ambition continuously grow the workload?

Stavros:

I can say that we are pretty proud of the control that we had. We knew it was going to be super hard to pull that off, so we’ve practiced what we always preach. Pre-production is king. We made sure we spent a lot of effort on pre-production and R&D, so we can have everything we need in place once the production starts. From there on, once we started to see the film take life, it was a matter of tidying it up a bit. Except for one part that we felt didn’t contribute as much to the story as it did on script, so we had to cut it off and keep it for another time.

Greg:

That’s certainly a hallmark of experienced creators – good planning and preparation. As far as R&D goes, can you tell me more about your technical pipeline? What tools (apart from Blender) did you depend on the most?

Stavros:

Substance Painter for texturing, RizomUV for UVing my assets (can’t go back to anything else after this), Zbrush for sculpting, and Maya just to work with Metahumans. That was the spine of my workflow.

More sparingly, I used so many tools and every trick in the book that I had. I even used xNormal! (this tool was made in 2006 and it’s still kicking!!!)

Greg:

Even after 20 years, xNormal still has a role to play! Well to wrap things up, I have only one more question, and it’s the cliché “what will you do differently next time?” – and perhaps, how do you feel right now about there even being a next time?

Stavros:

Ow of course there will be a next time!! It feels like we are just starting, and we can not wait to dive back in and expand that universe!

From each project we are learning, and after its completion we are evaluating what we did right and what we did wrong.

One thing we are discussing for the next one is how to keep the narrative strong, deliver a spectacle, but keep it shorter.

Also, our homes and loved ones missed us a bit too much during the making of SJOR, so we don’t know if the next one will be that long, but we will definitely try to make it better! 🙂

Greg:

That’s great to hear, SJOR felt like a teaser for a very interesting universe I’d love to see more of, so I can’t wait for what you guys do next!

Thanks a lot for taking the time for this on a Sunday, I feel like that speaks a lot about the passion you have for this project 🙂

Stavros:

Thanks again for your kind words, and it means the world to us knowing that people like you liked it! Everything we do we do from our hearts, and it doesn’t feel like work at all, so thank YOU for taking the time on a Sunday to ask me about it! We appreciate it a lot and please keep it up with BlenderNation!!

Watch the full short film on YouTube.