Working on my first films with zero skills
One of the films I am currently working on requires 3D animation,1 the bad news is that I have nearly zero experience with this. I am very good with CAD 3D modelling, but that’s different from what is necessary for film animation. I’ve made the donut 5 years ago2, but most of what I’d learned has been forgotten. In essence, for this project I need to re-learn Blender.
Specifically I will need to learn from scratch:
- 3D modelling
- character rigging
- 3D animation
- (probably) texturing, but not UV mapping (I hope)
- scene composition
On top of this I am not great at video editing, and recently decided to switch away from all Adobe products3, so I plan on using DaVinci Resolve. Which I have never used, so will need to learn.
Some more challenges will include:
- storyboarding (which I have done once before)
- 2D hand animation (have some experience, but not with Blender’s Grease Pencil)
- sound design and score
Sound engineering will be the biggest challenge by far, because although I have little experience in aspects, I am at the end of the day a visual artists, so I at least can visualise what I want and arrive to some approximation of that. As far as sound is concerned… I bought an electric piano one month ago, and can do some scales, chords and simple pieces, so composition will be a huge challenge, and something that scares me the most.
The good news is that completing projects, I believe, is the best way to learn, and my hope is that by the end of the year I will have finished my first two short films, gaining enough skills to more easily jump into future projects.
It is a lot to learn at once, and I probably should have picked something a lot smaller scope, but that seems less fun. Having all of the little challenges that I must solve keeps me on my toes. In any case, my approach is to break the big scary process down in the tiniest pieces and keep chewing at ‘em until… I’ve eaten all of the little pieces.. and the project is finished? I don’t think this metaphor works.
Well, I chose for it to require that. It could be avoided but in my mind the effects I am aiming for will be best sold with 3D volumes. ↩︎
I couldn’t find the original donut modelling tutorial by BlenderGuru, so here’s the most recent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haAdmHqGOw ↩︎
There are many reasons to not use Adobe, but for me, on a practical level, it just doesn’t work. The video programmes (Premiere Pro and After Effects) are slow, keep crashing, even when working on the simplest edits. ↩︎