How long it will take to create 3D short film of 15 minutes

How long it will take to create 3D short film of 15 minutes. Please let me know.

Depends - should it be a good film, or a bad one? But seriously, thereā€™s no way to answer this. Even if provided a LOT more context, there would be so many hidden variables that the answer would probably not be useful. The best way to get an answer is to start by making a short video yourself and then extrapolate from it.

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Hi Bart,
It should a good short film for the YouTube.

This all depending on the quality and the content that the film will show. Like, is it sci-fi? Something like that will take months to create, if itā€™s in space with ships. Is it fantasy? That could be something easier than sci-fi, but again, it all depends on the quality of the short film.

Iā€™m making a feature film in Blender, and will be having some complexity to it, which will take a good couple of years to create alone.

Even major studios takes a good few years to make a short film or feature film, depending on their acquired content and project (be it from book, comic, original story, etc).

Animation tends to take longer than modeling characters and rig them, but if youā€™re experienced in one field (like a sculptor for character), then I think youā€™ll be able to do this.

So, suffice to say, try and get a team of artists to assist you in working on the 15-minute short film and make it all according to your vision. All animators, artists, and directors has a vision to determine their projects together.

Either way, Iā€™m looking forward to see what you come up with for a short film and its story. Good luck.

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How long is a piece of string?

There is no way of telling. I remember a few years back someone on here spent a few years making a 3-5 min animation about a girl and a dragon. It was super high quality, but it took years.

There is no real way of answering the question. You sort of have to just try it. But just realise it will likely take a long time.

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About a week and a half.

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Depends on how fast you work.

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Centuries.

As I have tried to study a bit of screenplay writing, this is quite popular technique writers use, to get the juicy parts of the story first and then fill in the blanks. Such as for example the myth goes that the creators of ā€œMatrixā€ thought first about the ā€œbullet time effectā€ and then tried to build the entire movie of why this happens, otherwise without innovation they would never be able to make things work right.

So this means that you can try to work directly on the important bits of the movie, you will see real results instead of hypothetical concepts. Can you make 10 seconds look cool and interesting? Only then you will know that the movie will worth it and that you will have enough foundation to extrapolate backwards and forwards. You might have to extent your assets and animations but at least if you extend the foundation always chances are that you wonā€™t fall out of planning.

A short film will take exactly as long as it takes from the moment you start to the moment you say ā€œIā€™m done.ā€

As others have already said, their are so many variables that go into a project, that it is impossible to know how long it will take. I made an animated short film that was 1 and 1/2 minutes within a month. That included audio as well. The film was very simple, with 1 background, 1 character, no dialogue, it was all made by meā€¦

It takes a lot of work making a film, it depends on how many people you have working on it, how many characters/environments their are, HOW you make the film (animation or live action), the scope of the story, the visual style of the filmā€¦ Basically Iā€™m just saying that expect things to take time, and longer than you expect.

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Only two ways I know that projects are going to endā€¦

  • Itā€™s done :blush:
  • Iā€™m done :face_with_head_bandage:
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As an accurate answer to the question, iā€™d say it would take at least some time ! but no more.

You have to take in account many things and others that are very time consuming. Aside this the render depends on your renderer performance wich is your own choice.

Finally i can affirm this will take between 6 and 30 minutes to upload it to YT, depending on the final resolution/frame rate :slight_smile: ( and your inet speed ^^ )

happy blending !

EDIT: anyway: welcome here @raghu_sunkara !

Chris Jonesā€™s ā€˜The Passengerā€™ was 8 years for 7 minutes

ā€˜Pigeon Impossibleā€™ was 5 years for 6 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL19E7DC81F6D1D522

Both blogs are a lot of fun.

Really impressive that these people worked for so long on these projects. Though they are quite unlucky in terms of hardware power at that time (eg 2008 when pigeon was released) because it would make their iteration times nighmare-ish. I would not even imagine how long a render would take or even the smoke simulations.

However from a technical perspective we are very lucky in terms of technology and hardware power. Either getting real time renderings as of now in EEVEE ( or prior EEVEE could be done in Unreal 4 engine which is very capable in terms of graphics - or even Unreal 3 if you go even older ). Also Cycles is relatively fast in a good PC but even so there are cloud rendering services to get the hard stuff.

These dudes look like real veteran heroes having to work at such terms and produce these movies.

Too true!!!

But honestly, as long as you donā€™t give up on your project, having a version of your film ā€œDoneā€ is better than not at all!

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Less than an hour. Put a plane under the default cube, add a location key to the cube, give it a noise modifier, set the frames to 21600. Render animation.

But if you want to make a good 15 minute film? Probably months to years if youā€™re working alone. And with help, probably still months to years.

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Check out this thread. I believe the total time taken was a couple of thousand hours.

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According to my own experience, working alone has periods of momentum of having good work produced and then there are periods of slug where things donā€™t go well and R&D and tests are needed. And this is mostly involves learning. At least getting the technical difficulties out of the way first is important to clear all roadblocks. Imagine such as for example you want to learn a new foreign language and you donā€™t remember the words, so you would have to pause your thinking and look up the dictionary. In essence you canā€™t think fast and your thinking always get blocked by some missing information.

However once someone has reached up to a point of knowing how to use the tools and the techniques then is unstoppable force, can focus all of the energy into higher level thinking, such as organizational logistics, movie making theories, scene composition, etc.

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Hereā€™s how I would start. First, tell your story completely to yourself. Then, try to tell that same story visually, as a sequence of basic scenes. Each scene consists of characters doing something, probably involving some props, in some specific location or on a particular set. Each scene moves the story forward.

This can take a long time. Youā€™re writing a screenplay. Take as much time as you need.

Once you have that completely down, you can turn to the computer. You decide how big each set physically is, and how big each character and prop is. Then, modeling these things as geometric shapes that have the proper size and form-factor, you use fast EEVEE renders to ā€œstart shooting film.ā€ Name each shot, position and name each camera. (If you shoot from several angles, place and fix each camera and name it. You canā€™t see cameras on film.) Use the ā€œstampā€ feature to put identifying info at the bottom of each shot. Shoot a whole lot more film than you need.

Use the ā€œlinkingā€ features of Blender so that everything that youā€™re referencing, even though itā€™s just a cylinder or a cube right now, is a ā€œlinked asset.ā€ This is very important.

Take this film to a video editor ā€“ Blenderā€™s, another open source tool, a professional tool ā€“ and start assembling it into ā€œyour movie.ā€ Yes, you can get a performance out of a character that is a cylinder. Work on this until your movie actually feels complete. Put in some stand-in music if it helps. Of course you might approach this iteratively ā€“ completing the most-important scenes in the story-sequence and then back-filling the other parts as the need for them becomes clear.

Once again, this is going to take a lot more time than you suppose. If you watch any movie or TV show, you see the camera ā€œcutsā€ from one angle to another many times. (You donā€™t actually notice it until you become a filmmaker.) Thatā€™s cinematography. Youā€™re going to need to fast-render every one of those angles on your cylinder-actors with their trapezoid-props, then cut them all together in a smooth, natural and realistic way. What you finally come up with is a ā€œshot listā€: file-name, camera-name, starting and ending frame numbers. All the rest of the film goes on the cutting-room floor. (But, donā€™t throw it away yet. You never know.)

Youā€™ll find yourself arguing with the screenwriter while editing, asking the director if you can please have just one more camera angle, and chasing the screenwriter out of the room ā€“ if you want to ā€“ when he comes up with a new twist on the story and begs you to include it. :wink: Since all of these people are probably ā€œyou,ā€ youā€™ll need to be a project-manager too, to please ā€œthe money peopleā€ (also ā€œyouā€) and keep the project centered on the release-date. Just donā€™t chase any white rabbits.

ā€œNow, your movieā€™s finished.ā€ All you have to do now is render it.

So, go back to some of those linked-asset files and replace that cylinder with an actor, that cube with a table, that trapezoid with a car. Re-render the portions of ā€œfilmā€ that you actually wound up using, and suddenly those modeled things appear where cylinders, cubes and trapezoids used to be. Decorate the sets which used to be planes (of the correct scale ā€¦), and suddenly the action is happening in a location. And so on. You are ā€œsneaking up onā€ your already-finished movie, one detail at a time. And, asset-linking makes this possible.

This workflow works because it pushes the actual decision-making and movie-making ahead of the time-consuming technical process of rendering, and even modeling. Itā€™s faster because you decide ahead of time what you actually need to render. It works because everything is actually ā€œto scale.ā€

It has been called, "Edit, then shoot."

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If itā€™s meant to be a professional quality film, a lot. Iā€™m a vfx artist working in the film industry and recently I decided to create my first cgi short movie using Blender. Of course doing a cgi short movie all by yourself itā€™s a tough idea and just developing the setting
and the characters for mine took two months of hard work. And I bought lots of the assets also. I donā€™t want to discourage you, at all, itā€™s a wonderful experience filled with satisfaction and interesting researches and discoveries. But, to answer your question, it takes a lot of work and a lot of time (if, of course, you need to create something more complex than a cube spinning for 15 minutes).

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