1. Prep
    1. I've been using blender on and off since Blender 2.3 days
    2. Started getting more involved because I knew I wanted to do an animated film with blender 2.8
    3. Leveraged my software knowledge/skills to port python add-ons
    4. Tested blender 2.8 and reported bugs
    5. tried different add-ons like MB-Lab, makehuman, got familiar with the rigs.
    6. Practised with small animation; run cycles; recreated a star trek scene
  2. Story
    1. I knew I wanted to make a short movie with a story, and not just a showcase for animation.
    2. I knew I wanted to work with actors.
    3. Settled on a story I wrote back in 2018 about an astronaut trying to save her ship from some disaster. The theme revolves around how great achievements don't really mean much unless we share them with those we love.
    4. The strategy I was going with is to use the Ironman approach. Exterior scenes are all animated, but the actor is filmed in HUD style for all the actual character bits.
  3. Collecting assets
    1. I'm not a modeler and if I would create everything myself, that would take a tone of work.
    2. So I ended up buying the spacesuite models from CGtrader
    3. The spaceship interior from blender market
    4. The other spaceship interior from the UE marketplace
    5. The spaceship exterior from Kitbash3D
    6. And a bunch of other models from sketchfab under the creative commons license
  4. Storyboard
    1. Created the storyboard in blender
  5. Casting
    1. things at this point are running in parallel. This is a one man show.
    2. Put out a casting call on vancouver actors guide: https://www.vancouveractorsguide.com/
    3. Went through the casting process and let me tell you its hard. There are a lot of talented people
    4. Settled on laura who did her audition with her husband William as the reader. I liked both of them so cast them for the lead roles. Made my life easier logistically.
  6. Animation
    1. Worked my butt off to get the animation done before we started filming
  7. Camera work
    1. Was able to get some of the animated camera work in, but couldn't finish everything before filming
  8. Live Production
    1. We filmed at my place. the HUD shots were easy to setup. All the filming was done in front of a black screen.
    2. The second day of filming was done on location. I was expecting a couple of guys to help out but ended up with the DoP and myself only. So was wearing multiple hats
  9. Post
    1. Worked with the talented Arya Afshar. I had to provide him with a semi locked version of the movie
    2. Had to do that before rendering so I ended up doing a screen capture of the blender view port and providing him that
    3. Of course the blender view port doesn't run in the actual fps so I needed to speed it up to what I think should be the right frame rate. However that resulted in a not very accurate timing
    4. I paid for that when I actually rendered, because the scenes didn't match exactly and that caused a little bit of a churn from the music side.
  10. Rendering
    1. Worked on the lighting of the scenes. Learned that using a lot of lights make the rendering very slow.  HDRI lighthing is your friend. I found that I can reduce the lights in the scene by using a good HDRI to light the scene and then adding lights to enhance it afterwards.
    2. Super add-on that I just love is: Physical Atmosphere. All the space scenes was lit with that add-on
    3. I have a computer with 128GB of ram and I needed all of it to render the scenes. Because my other computers chocked on the scenes and died. So I could only use my main computer.
    4. Rendering took 10 days of full time computing power to render all the scenes.
    5. Then I needed to integrate that with the live shots
    6. I ended up cutting the first 2 minutes of the movie, which were a love story montage. At the end it felt cheesy and didn't add to the story very well. It was a bit gut wrenching because the second filming day was all that.
  11. CGIBros
    1. I submitted to multiple youtube channels and CGBros were generous enough to put it on their channel
    2. Currently trying to get it landed on CGMeetup... I think these two platforms would be great for debuting my work.
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