Not to be narcissistic or anything lol, but I’m trying to make a real-deal movie in Blender. I’m aiming to make weekly videos documenting the journey 
Week 1 is here!
I hope you guys enjoy it!
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That’s a big dream, but you gotta dream big to do something extraordinary. At the very least it’s gonna be a whole lot of cool learning experiences. I wish you all the best! Keep us updated here.
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The reason feature films have huge teams is because every individual step requires so many thousands of hours. You can’t reasonably expect to do all their tasks in a fraction of the time and get similar output. I’m currently making a documentary as a solo creator, and it’s only realistic by using intelligent shortcuts. An example would be animations that don’t have tween frames. For this there’s the Blender add-on Loom, so I only render the key frames. Saves render time this way as well. Another example is to use rendering styles that are either painterly or toon shaded. Saves you a lot of work on lighting and most of my frames can be rendered with only 1 sample. Another shortcut is to buy your materials from other YouTube creators, often you can get amazing materials for $1. One creator made an amazing water color material which I’m now using, and he gives it away for free.
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One other tip for you; Break your scenes down into constituent parts, only render out those parts which are animated, and use the compositor to put everything together. This also makes it faster for you to iterate on your animations because the time to re-render those animated parts is so much faster.
BTW, many of the animation techniques used in anime follow similar principles. Maybe take some time to learn about anime techniques.
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Work smarter, not harder. Good luck.
Working smarter, not hard is gonna be one of my mottos this year 
Thanks!
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Have you seen American Movie?
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No, I haven’t
Martin Klekner has been making a (6 min long) short movie on his own for 4 years (and will be watchable on 21st of January 2023 on his YouTube channel). His dedication for his project is so inspirational.
Here are some links if you are interested in knowing more:
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Yeah, that is such a cool project!
May I suggest you record the voice over before making the animatic?
It will be essential to getting the timing right.
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Hahah, VERY good idea :D. Thanks :).
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If you have any questions about anything, I am happy to help.
Another thing worth considering is even though we definitely create everything we make from scratch in Blender. There are some things that don’t make sense to us. Trees and plants for example. For us we just use libraries.
But in your case doing stuff all by yourself there might be a good reason to use existing assets in your project to save time.
There is no shame in it.
In fact, we have applied for an Unreal Mega Grant and if we get it, it will mean being able to release a ton of assets in our internal libraries that we have been creating for one of our projects.
This is something that might help people like yourself get projects off the ground.
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Looking foreward to seeing how this comes out! I looked at your youtube channel, You have done some pretty good work! The more you work at it the more it will improve as well! Your live action shots are pretty good for timing and camera placement, for your timing in blender you could shoot a informal live action, then animate to it. Just a though/observation, but your little Wall-E clip, the clips were a little clipped, and there was some guessing what happened as opposed to knowing (even without being directly shown) if you know what I mean.
So I did try to watch your script at .25 speed to spoil it (lol) but didn’t quite get the gist. Do you mind giving a general plot or synopsis? What style of story is this? My impression is drama?
also It wouldn’t hurt to keep this thread updated with your latest video on the process as we would all probably like to follow your progress!
Here is the link to the second video anyone that wants to see it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4NblA8aXO8
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LOL, thanks! Yeah, I’d say it’s a drama. Basically here’s the plot:
Betty Fleetfoot and her family live on a farm. But Betty has always wanted a horse. Her estranged uncle - Spud Dobber shows up for her birthday party and gives her one… but there’s a catch. To keep the horse Betty must best him. And Spud is one of the best horse racers that have ever walked the earth. And so the drama ensues!
And I try to keep people updated in my Discord server here if anyone is interested https://discord.gg/AH4NyNYKF9 But since there seems to be a good amount of people who are interacting with this thread I’ll keep you all posted here as well!
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It’s possible but it requires a very high level of skill and a very high level of dedication from all team members
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Week 3 is here!
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And here is week 4! (not much happened haha…)
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Week 5 is here baby!
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Week 6!!
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I just wanted to say, I think what you’re doing is Amazing! Best of luck!
Btw, I don’t think any of the video sites (Youtube and the others) have a stipulation that if you upload a video to their site, then you can’t have uploaded anywhere else, right? So when you’ve finished your movie, upload it everywhere you can think of, sites like d.tube, peertube, odysee, etc. etc. This SHOULD get more cash coming in.
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Quick tip: put the youtube link on its own line - it’ll expand into a player. I edited your recent posts to do this.
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