Sci Fi Short Film

Artwork Finished Projects
#1

I just submitted my entry for “It’s Art” magazine’s 3D animation competition. The theme was “Time Traveller’s Guide For Dummies”, where you create a video based on the guide, giving tips for time travel.

I was scrambling to get this done by the deadline, so it is pretty rough. I shot the video in my living room in front of a green screen and created all of the CGI with Blender 2.5 and rendered it with Octane.

This is my first attempt at shooting green screen and compositing, as well as attempting to model anything like vehicles and interiors. I have mostly done motion graphics and abstract animations in the past.

Even though the competition is over, I’m going to consider this video more of a “work in progress” and try to improve some of the interiors and add some scenes I didn’t have time to finish and hopefully release a better video in a few months.

http://vimeo.com/13298491

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#2

Haha! Awesome job! I was very impressed on the keying quality as well as the rich texturing and CG live interaction. You created a whole sort of mood with this piece of work. The real characters in a completely CG world, interesting. I love the slightly monotone statements as well.

#3

Very interesting.

Quick correction though – the Titanic sunk bow first…

#4

I actually knew that when I was creating that scene, but that would have meant modeling the propeller and other details of the bottom stern, so I had it go the other way. People aren’t suppose to notice that.:smiley: I had to create that animation in a few hours during the last couple days before the deadline, so I didn’t have time for modeling those details.

Since I will be improving things for a final version, I will have a chance to do that scene properly. I’m thinking of changing that scene quite a bit. It was suppose to have an abstract feel like those airline emergency instructions or Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy type of reference, but I think it ended up just looking like a cheesy animation.

#5

I figured you had your reasons for that. :cool:

Now that I think about it, the quirkiness of introduction reminded me of how Portal introduced dangers into the game (though, that was mostly audio/picture). I thought that overall, that scene was pretty solid.

#6

Thanks for the comments. I was surprised how easily After Effect’s Keylight plugin handled the keying. I was afraid there would be problem areas, but it handled everything pretty well. Quite a few scenes I had completely keyed in about 45 seconds per scene. Some scenes required animated masks, but nothing too complex. The scenes could have done with more polish with the keying, but I was in a rush to finish by the deadline.

I’ve attached a picture of my living room with the green screen and a typical scene to key. I don’t think I had to even worry about masking out the shadows in that scene, since Keylight removed them fairly well.

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#7

Your directing needs a bit of work :slight_smile:

#8

No doubt. I need work in a lot of areas.:smiley: This was my first time attempting to shoot a short film, so at least I will be able to learn from my mistakes and try to improve.

It was made a little more difficult with having such a confined space to work in when their environments were suppose to be larger, but I could see things were not editing together well.

I need to plan things out better with a previz or storyboard to make sure things are going to look good. I plan on doing some test scenes for practice, before I attempt to do anything like this again.