Creating a 3D short film is hard.
Most people may share how technically challenging a project is, the time involved and how what an incredible experience it was to create it. They're on the other side of the the dip, they made it and it feels good. 👍
What most people don't share is the suck, the middle of production schedule where the end feels so far away with the mountain of challenges to overcome and with some of the original passion atrophying. If you're curious to learn more about the dip, Seth Godin wrote a whole book about it.
This is where we're at now with Eat Sheep. 😅
It's not all bad, and actually in my experience a normal part of every project I've been involved in. From my time at video game companies, working freelance projects and even to the original Eat Sheep iPad game. There is a period of time that will try to deter you to stop. You must not, this is the natural filter, the separator of successes and failures. The ability to not give up when others do, willing to do things when you may not feel like it.
Let's push through the dip! 🚀
Storyboards are complete!
What started out as a five-minute script written by Joe Trohman, has turned into ~14min animated film!
With three ACTs, 27 sequences with 204 shots and thousands of frames. 😅 Led by the efforts of Paul Caggegi, all of these boards have been visualized in Blender 3D, utilizing the power of the 2D Grease Pencil.
This has enable us to be nimble, and fast on story board creation within Blender. Meanwhile since everything is being drawn in Blender, this leads to some cool opportunities down the road for immersive animatic experiences.
Co-director, Wayne Dixon and myself will now be reviewing these boards for final timing passes with scratch audio passes. a.k.a. Wayne and I recording ourselves making funny noises, grunts and whooshes to get a sense of pace. 🤓
3D Characters and Environments are coming to life
I've found that production tends to have a lot going on at the same time. They key is to be aware of all the lanes of production, and managing those resources to be ready when the other lanes require it.
Since storyboards begun, the Blender 3D team has been active creating our hero characters of the film: Melvin, Cale and the Farm Wrangler, along with ancillary 3D assets that we'll need in the film.
Melvin the monster has come a long way from the early iPad game days. Getting a fresh mesh, rig and attitude to have him ready to perform for this film. Thanks to the Character creation talent of Lucas Falcao, and rigging efforts from Wayne Dixon, Melvin is ready to consume so hi-def sheep.
Melvin is our single focused character with motivation largely driven by hunger. Similar to Winnie the Poo, the craving for Honey (Sheep) is never really satisfied.
Say hello to Cale, the sheep
The brains of the operation, Cale while physically limited compared to Melvin has the street and book smarts to help him navigate the dangerous world of Eat Sheep.
Technically, Cale has been the most challenging Blender character to redesign. We wanted his fur to feel like fur, while maintaining the style of the film: a nod to stop-frame animation, with a hint of CG. Meaning we want this universe to feel as though it could have been crafted in real life.
We have a few more challenges to overcome with this character, particularly a scene where Cale gets soaked with rain.
Wranglers are not kind to sheep nor monster, as their interests like in world domination through the sales of wool. The farm wrangler was challenging to pull of the, "could have been modeled in real life" given the hair type, and clothing. Overall I feel we were pretty successful in doing this.
Next up, we'll be taking all of our hero characters into Unreal Engine. At our core, we're a Blender team, though get excited thinking about the opportunities and visual style shooting this film in Unreal will bring.
Work has also begun creating our ancillary characters: Sun, Dog, and Bunnies. Below are some early WIP test renders.
Chunck Trafagander has been building the Eat Sheep world within Blender. From the trees, barn to a worlds best wrangler award, the Eat Sheep universe is coming to life, model by model.
The intention is to build the shots within Blender with linked proxy objects, enabling Wayne and the animators to begin blocking in cameras and animation.
Stuff we're working on next
We're creating a real-time animated short with Blender and Unreal. Understanding Blender is our superpower, we're subscribing to the thought if we can make it look beautiful in Blender, we'll figure out a way to make it look just as good, if not better in Unreal 5.
- Focusing on a particular shot to achieve a vertical slice of the film. We've picked out a specific shot within ACT 01 that we'll be taking to finish. Meaning creating all the assets within Blender, exporting out static and kinetic assets to Unreal, assembling, lighting and rendering within Unreal. This will help us define the pipeline for the rest of the film!
Challenges ahead
- Tricky VFX Shots: Melvin rolling up a layer of grass as a blanket, the hero tree being ripped out of the ground, Cale's wool getting soaked in the rain, integrating stylized cool 2D VFX for weapon zap, flies out of the wallet, etc,
- Timeline and breadth of animation work. Currently, we're sitting at around ~15mins of film. Once we get into this stage re-adopting Ftrack, or production management software will be key to delegating chunks of work, while bringing on additional help,
- Finding Unreal TD person to fit the needs of the project. For the film's more advanced VFX requests we're going to need to have somebody in this TD role. Interested, shoot me an email at [email protected].
- Getting to the finish line. This is a big endeavor and it seems daunting to reach the finish line. But bit by bit we'll get there!
- Creating education from the film to the CG Cookie community. Part of the grant was to enable us to also share our experiences of creating the film with the community. This could be through blogging, YT streams, creating mini-courses on how assets were modeled, storyboards, rigging, and to animation. It's a daunting thought atm, but something I'd like us to think about is how to best include the community in the journey.
Thanks for reading along and support our project. Eat Sheep is a beloved IP of CG Cookie and its community. While the goal is to simply create something we're all proud of, I cannot help to dream bigger of this making its round to festivals, pitches to Netflix, and just making more plushies. 😎
Onward! 🍪
Wes
