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Aaaaand that’s a wrap! I’ve ‘finished’ my film and it’s time for the fun of film festivals and job applications.

I figured I should upload something to bookend this blog on my film production. Apologies for the radio silence as I approached the end. I put the word finished in quotations as while I’ve completed requirements for my MFA Thesis Film, I feel like there’s always improvements that could be made. As you’ll see in the previous posts, there were many compromises I had to make due to my own lack of skill. Regardless, I am proud of what I have been able to create, and hope to produce even better works in the future.

Now, as for seeing the finished film, I won’t make it publicly available for a while (unless you’re reading this from the far future, in which case, hello!). I hope to submit to some film festivals and see how that pans out. However, if for some reason you really want to see the film, please shoot me a message and I’ll provide you with a private link.

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Test renders to get an idea of the lighting in the final shot.

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An admittedly rather rushed merger of scene tests, to make a 'rough film'. This was to get more of an idea of what the film is shaping up to look like, and what fixes I need to prioritise going forward with the time remaining. It is a mixture of renders and playblasts, loosely fitted to the rough soundtrack. If I’m honest, it’s a little dissapointing to look at, but let’s hope that this can serve as a skeleton that I’ll greatly improve upon over the next month.

As I already had some major changes in mind for one of the earlier scenes, I may end up making an updated rough film if I make enough progress in the next week.

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A playblast of a rough version of S05S01, slotted into the rough soundtrack from earlier. The comb sits on a dresser and time flies as the room fills up with objects as the owner lives their life. I’m not sure the animation alone carries the idea of years passing, but I’m hoping that a)The concept of time passing is already familiar by this point in the film, and b)Using lighting and perhaps post-effects I can better convey the time passing. 

If I have enough time once I have completed and refined other scenes, I may add more objects to the room.

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Test Render of the Cannon blast vdb I created using embergen. Render was done using Cycles for Blender.

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Playblast of S04S03. The artifactEffigy, rising from being tossed in the shot prior, flies upward then is squashed by 2 metal frames. the frames part to reveal a cannonball, which is then loaded into a cannon and fired. The visual effects are not present in the playblast.

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A Playblast and test frames from S04S04. The artifactCannonball flies through the air, crashes into a palace. when the dust clears, it is a prison ball in a prison, which is then shattered to reveal an afrocomb. Quite abstract of a transition.

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S02S02 Test Render, again fitted to the rough soundtrack from my composer. This one was already in the works but I may go for playblasts or Maya software renders to speed up time with the remaining roughs. This suggestion came from one of my advisors, so that way I can get through the rest of the roughs a bit quicker, even if they less represent the final look. I will maybe try to accompany those with a few render frames.

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A test render of the city-destroying explosion near the end of the film. I created the VDB in Embergen, building off of one of their examples as a base. I then brought the volume file into Blender and rendered it with Cycles. It seems the final shot will likely take many hours to render, even at a low-ish quality.

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A test render of S02S01, the Rock Hammer Reveal shot. I decided to place more emphasis on the reveal of this technology by having it be more of a cutaway; removing the forest background and having some dramatic lighting. The shot after will be right back in the forest environment.

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Another rough render, this time with extra roughness! Still, it conveys the idea of what I’m going for in the final scene.

This render is of Scene 04 Shot 01. After the effigy is used as a weapon, it is dropped on the ground where it remains for quite some time. Grass grows around it before it is picked up by a white arm with a red coat, meant to represent someone in the vein of British redcoats, or perhaps imperial explorers.

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A render test of S03S02, composited without any extra effects yet added. The plan for the eventual final render would be to add a buffer of about 24 frames to the end of each texture’s screen time, so that I can transition between them nicely in post, rather than an abrupt cut (When I tried to transition between them instead in the Maya scene, using an AiLayer shader, I couldn’t get the displacement to carry over). Additionally, I will need to make the objects that move around between each cut look more overt and intentional. I will likely also revisit the worshipping hands motion, and try to make it look less stiff.

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WIP of S03S02 Effigy Worship. The building blocks are coming together, but there is still more work to do on the scene. This is the longest unbroken shot in the film at 38 seconds. texture changes will occur on the effigy and its shrine and ornaments to show time passing while hands worship in the foreground.

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A glitchy render of the original version of S01S02. A more straightforward passage of time as we see the forest literally grow around the ArtifactOreRock. Rendered in Arnold for Maya

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After talking with my advisor, I decided to experiment with redesigning the diorama aspect of the film. In this clip, S01S02, we see the artifactOreRock sitting in the early earth as time passes. In my redesign, rather than the scene being on a floating platform, with the grass and trees growing, I decided to make it be more like a stage play with a moving set. I made a cylindrical environment which would rotate to show the passing of time, with objects closer to the camera being physically scaled up, and objects further away being scaled down, to make it look as though I am trying to fake an illusion of depth. 

I then tried rendering this shot with a fisheye camera. This redesign was all done in Blender, and rendered with cycles. I added some effects in After Effects to help sell the idea of it being some sort of ‘fast-forwarding’ of time. This clip was again slotted into the soundtrack draft from my composer.

Attached is an image of the redesigned environment experiment. I wonder if this extreme stylisation would be too incongruous with the rest of the film?

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WIP of the Scene 01 Shot 01 of the film. An extremely low-quality render to help get a rough idea of the movement and camera. Slotted into the initial soundtrack draft from my composer.

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A rough version of Scene03_Shot01, rendered in Blender’s realtime engine, Eevee. The final version will be either in Cycles, or Unreal (once I learn more about it)

I had had some trouble configuring my VDB for the fire VFX in Maya, and opted to just export the whole scene as an alembic then set it up with the VDB file in Blender. Surprisingly, that worked and was a lot less stressful! I had to recreate some shader work for the molten metal, but that proved to also be easier in Blender. I then set up a quick low-quality render, and set that to the appropriate part of the WIP soundtrack. 

I will need to work more on the shot, particularly lighting it properly, before the final render. However I feel it is in a fine enough place for me to focus more on other parts of the film, in the interest of good time management.