After teaching myself blender last November I hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to use it professionally. When freelance work dried up in March of this year I decided, “if not now, when?” 9 months later, I am proud to present the animated intro for my original web series: “Redline Ronin and The Seven Deadly Swords”
The short was created in blender 2.81 and TVPaint. It relies heavily on 2d techniques and NPR rendering inside blender’s native eevee real time render engine. Please check it out and enjoy!
Directed and Animated by Chris Boylan
Starring: Tyrone Magnus
Executive Producer: Jessica Moon
Music: DEADLIFE
Graphic Design: Gary ‘Bubba’ Swarer
Additional animation/Previs: Billy Cabey
Really stunning work and a great example of how many powerful, unique interpretations of Blender’s toolkit there are. Your sensibilities within the genre and use of space and transitions is astounding.
If I were to posit any constructive criticism it would not be on the work you’ve already done here but rather to suggest an additional simple pass of color correction to push the sense of depth and texture with a vignette, overlay & screen inverse falloff glows, some light cooling of shadows and warming of highlights, light post motion blur, film grain etc. I personally think that could push it over the top in production quality (because all of your fundamentals are superb). Because I am spending time thinking about how these types of layers interact with various types of renders I took the liberty of mocking up some of these effects on your intro in case it piques your interest (sending via DM). It would need a lot of tweaking to match each shot and where youve already applied glows the stacked glows get pretty out of hand. Film grain is too strong. Still it could lead to you gaining an extra easy 5% in production quality even if you were to interpret these kind of top level finishing touches in your own way. Just my 2c! Great work that represents Blender at a new level!
I greatly appreciate the constructive criticism. Your quick comp was also very illustrative, thanks for that…except now you’ve opened a can of worms and you’re going to have to walk me through some of the things you did to achieve those results…buhaha!
I’m looking to push my next short even further, and some of these tips you’ve outlined above will go a long way to really helping guide me towards a more refined and polished art direction.
Let me know if theres anything specific I can weigh in on! I can even send across a Davinci Resolve project file if its helpful. I’m happy if you found it productive enough to determine your own interpretation of those final tweaks that can help make things read a bit quicker and gel the aesthetic.
