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Creating my own Short Film - A good Idea?
🕑 Added 2024-11-15 09:21:52 +0000 UTCHey Patrons,
I’ve been reflecting on a few things over the past couple of days and wanted to share my thoughts with you to get your input.
If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know my interests are all over the map. Whether it’s spacecraft and planets, WWII ships and planes, Napoleonic naval battles, medieval fantasy, modern warfare, or more, I love diving into these topics and creating detailed scenes in Blender.
But here’s the thing: once I’ve created something in one theme, I often feel satisfied and excited to move on to something completely different. This has always made me wonder if my projects might feel a bit disjointed to you as an audience. One video could focus on Napoleonic ships, and the next might be a tutorial on texturing sci-fi spaceships (that one’s coming very soon, by the way!).
Another thing that has been bothering me about my work is that it consists of smaller, individual animations rather than one cohesive, bigger project. One of my biggest inspirations, Ian Hubert, is well-known for his Dynamo Dream series, which ties all his work together. On his Patreon, he shares his progress on that single world, which gives it a strong sense of focus.
That got me thinking: How can I combine all my varied interests into one overarching project?
Then, I remembered the incredible trailers for Civilization VI, which take place across multiple historical and fictional eras:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KdE0p2joJw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOT9T15mkX0
I thought, What if I created something similar? Some sort of Short film spanning multiple eras.
This would allow me to combine a lot of my interests into one project.
What exactly this would be about I don’t know. On the one hand this could depict historic events, like WW2, the moon landing, etc. On the other hand this could be about Human exploring, or human conflict.
I really like how inspiring these Civ VI trailers are. So showing battles or war, or simply too much military stuff might give this a darker spin, which I’m not sure I like.
The Civ trailers use a human protagonist to lead the narrative, but I’ve always shied away from detailed character work, since it is a lot of effort to make the look realistic and believable. It’s not my strongest skill, and I’m not really motivated to dive into it right now.
So, one options would be to do these characters in real life, and either extend the real sets with 3D or place them into the 3D scene with greenscreen. Even though I find this type of work really interesting, and I definitely want to do work like that in the future, I currently don’t have much experience with it and I also don’t have the necessary equipment like good camera, lights, greenscreen, actors etc.
A different option would be to avoid seeing characters faces and closeup characters in general. This way I would not have create super realistic and believable characters, but something much simpler might work. Similar what I did in the F35 and Eurofighter animation, where I had the pilot with his full helmet on in the foreground, out of focus.
But then I’m not sure if this would hit the same as the Civ trailers.
At this point, these are just thoughts—nothing is set in stone. Who knows if I’ll stick with the idea of creating a short film at all, but I’d love to hear your perspective.
What do you think? Does the idea of blending multiple eras into one cohesive project sound exciting to you? And how do you feel about the balance between epic battle scenes and an inspiring tone?
Besides the Civilisation trailers, is there anything like that already out there? What comes to mind?
Thanks for reading and for all your support!
Comments
Gehrig Campbell-Dempsey
Sounds exciting! All I can offer is what my own experience with my recently wrapped short film, which was I intentionally wrote a sci-fi story that I knew I'd love, and would have achievable VFX that I could do (but that I'd still have to work my ass off to achieve...) and in that regard it worked out, but godamn it did take about two years to finally finish... In my case though that was fine, my end goal is writing/directing live action features. And I got a loooot of experience doing it. So I almost feel like you'd be better served thinking about what you want LONG term, and seeing how many long term goals you can satisfy with a short film. If it's just about technical showcasing, a narrative isn't necessarily needed. Little projects will potentially better serve your needs. But if you want to tell stories, then yeah maybe write an intentionally short story that you can achieve quickly, do it.. and see if you liked the process? Ian has launched himself into a many season TV show, but clearly loves the narrative side, whereas some creators aren't into that as much. Either way, love your work, excited to see what you do next.
Patrik Körtvély
I started 3D to create a short film. I am passionate about history and I wanted to create it for myself by bringing the battles alive and the people real. I intend to do a short film in the future, similarly to you on historical events for sure, its a good idea. I always welcome people passionate about history and it would be amazing it being alive, like the Napoleonic ships or a medieval life in a castle for example. If you are interested I am open for a colab 24/7 if we are talking about history.
