As the title indicates, I just finished work on a (mostly) live-action short called “Banachnid!”. Now what’s the genre of that thing again… Is it Horror? Yeah, it’s a kind of small-scale creature feature I suppose…
The film is about some slacker college student who was given a shoe box by some other student who apparently is a kick-ass biology/gene-manipulation wizard. Said box contained a bullfrog - or did it?
Anyway, whatever was in there, it’s now living in the protagonists bathtub. Hilarity ensues
All VFX and title animations were done using Blender. Especially the new compositing functionality came in handy. The Gimp was used as well, and so was other free/open software like Audacity.
In case you happen to understand German, please grabthis version (64MB).
Otherwise, a version with English language subtitles is also available (64MB).
A website with some nifty B-Movie style poster art for the film and the same links can be found here.
i was just thinking…the spider would probably benefit from a darker material, perhaps with some tiny hairs or something, more like a tarantula or something
I didn’t want hairs on the spider creature (“banachnid” = banana + arachnid) because I think that “slick” spiders are more scary. Furry spiders like tarantulas are almost cute in a certain way
In order to create the colormap texture for the banachnid, I carefully “unwrapped” a real banana and scanned the resulting slices using a flatbed scanner. There is this advice of making skin textures “twice the width of the output screen format”, and I ended up with 2048x2048px image full of tiny details. However, most of those details have vanished by the time you see the creature on screen due to the camera-to-creature distance and texture filtering. There is also an elaborate Gimp script involved, which I wrote to make the clean CGI shots match the MiniDV camera footage.
The ending is supposed to be a weird “WTF?!” ending. The guy who created the banachnid creature sends another homegrown monster to kill the hero because he knew too much about those crazy experiments. That’s why you hear car doors being slammed shut and a vehicle driving away when the student guy opens the door. The bipedal creature at the end was dropped off, so to speak
It’s also fully modelled and animated, but untextured. Maybe I will post a rendering of that creature later today. It is known as the “uber-shark”…
The video codec is XviD and the sound is MP3 encoded. It shouldn’t take an advanced multimedia player setup to get proper playback. VLC, MPlayer and xine are all good candidates.
I personally prefer other formats, but things like Matroska containers with Ogg Vorbis soundtracks can be troublesome for the end user.
I just tried to release the film in a form that doesn’t require any special player or bleeding-edge codec installation to enjoy both picture and sound
Watching videos should be as easy as pie for everyone.
The toilet door hinge doesn’t change its position. This would normally require some shot being flipped, and that was one trick I did not have to resort to
Generally quite good. A well built and animated spider, and very good camera-tracking (what did you use?). The whole thing is better lit than most horror films. The film image frose on me a few times - Maybe I should try a better player? What happened to the egg-sack?
