I’m new to Blender and was wondering: Has anyone created a full-length movie using Blender or similar software? And by full-length, I mean 60-90 minutes long. I enjoy watching the short films on YouTube, but they are all between five and twenty minutes long. Even then, I notice from the closing credits that many people are involved in a project. For an individual, I would imagine modeling, sculpting, animating, and, of course, rendering, a 90-minute movie of decent quality would take years. Thoughts?
http://gooseberry.blender.org/about/
The Blender Foundation is attempting to do a feature-length animated film, but such films require heavy financing. The cost of project Goosebery is estimated at around 1,500,000€ for the whole production, and only around 285,000€ have been collected from the crowdfunding campaign a few months ago. The idea currently is for the BF to use that ~285,000€ from the campaign to make a short 10-15 minute “Pilot” with which to pitch the project for more funding. It’s still uncertain whether it will succeed or not.
Free Birds (Plumiferos) was the first, was released in 2010 I believe, there was also an announcement not long ago, an Indian movie if I remember correctly, but in the works, not released yet!
Thanks for the reply, but I want to know if it’s feasible for an individual person to do it.
There are a few films on pre-production or production made with Blender. As mentioned by Pesho and GCharb, there’s “Goosberry project” by the Blender Foundation + 12 studios around the world (if they succeed financing the film), “Naughty 5” by Vivify studio (India) and “Kiribati: una vieja aventura” (“Kiribati: and old adventure”) by Ideas Fijas (Argentina).
Blender potential for film production is yet to be seen in the near future. Exciting times!
Regardless of the software, it is next to impossible for a single person to create a full length movie that is anything more than a couple of cubes running into each other for 90 minutes. People spend years on personal short films that don’t even touch big-budget quality.
All in all Giants in the Earth is something like 4 hours total. Quality is so - so, Transformers Beast Wars level –
Well, for a good quality film, 3d or real, it’s unlikely to be possible. Film-making demands tons of work and resources (!). Right now, even if you have the time (years) and knowledge to do it, rendering it will take ages. Take for example “Piero” by Kent Tramell or “Caminandes” to see how time adds up when you take into account what’s needed:
- First you need the idea. From there, usually, you’ll work on the script, which needs to be specially solid for animation (it’s not that simple to make changes afterwards). Then a good storyboard for animation and concept drawings for modelling. Even for something simple as Piero, 1 week it’s not enough.
- Kent Tramell is a professional 3d artist. I don’t know how much time it took him to model, shade and rig Piero + the props and set, but let’s say about a week and a half. For NON-professional artist, or hobbyists, time will increase exponentially, if going for same quality
- Then animating. Again, a lot of planning, probably filming reference videos depending on the film.
- Rendering… for something like Piero or Caminandes, in my rig it takes about 8 minutes to render a frame in 1080p. That means: 192 hours for 1 minute at 24 frames per second (8 days!). Extrapolate that to a feature film… 480 days for 60 minutes, supposing the computer won’t die in the process.
- Let’s say you survive until here and you just do a simple compositing work, nothing fancy. You have to make the sound! Again, film-making it’s (generally) all about planning, designing, etc. This should be planned in the script stage, and it requires equipment and knowledge about recording and editing sound. Piero or Caminandes doesn’t have any lip-sync, but if your film does, that means even more work for animation.
Another example is R’ha, a 6 and a half minutes film, not made entirely with Blender. I read the guy who did it made it on his own and that it took him about 6 months. I would say go for a short film if you are considering doing a film on your own. You’ll learn a great deal. If a feature is what you fancy, look for people you can work with.
Cheers
While it certainly is possible, the level of quality will equate to how much time you’re willing to spend on it.
Currently David Krupicz is nearing the end of animating his feature film, ‘Cold Dark Mirror’, in Blender. You can see a trailer here or check out his blog.
Not sure how long it’s taken him, but it’s been at least a couple of years. He’s done 2 other films previously, but not in Blender. I wish David was a little more up to date on posting info for his latest film on his blog, but he is posting updates to the Blender Hangout group over on FaceBook.
There’s also M Dot Strange’s features that he’s done. ‘We Are The Strange’ (took roughly 7 years to make), ‘Heart String Marionette’ (took 4 years to make) and ‘I Am Nightmare’ (took a little over a year to complete). He’s also done a bunch of episodes for a couple of web series that he created. Those usually took him a week. However, most people don’t like his animation style. It’s not the clean Pixar or Dreamworks stuff. M Dot has recently announced that he’s no longer going to make films/movies and that he instead is working on making games. M Dot’s stuff is always done using Cinema4D. If you want to learn more, his blog covers the making of his last 2 features as well as a ton of other stuff related to making your own animated features.
And I can’t forget my good pal Jeff Lew and his feature film ‘Killer Bean Forever’! It took him 4-5 years to complete, using Maya Complete if I recall correctly. Of course Jeff used motion capture for the mundane walking and general animated shots, while keyframing all the action stuff himself. Sadly, Jeff seems to have disappeared off the face of the planet and taken what remains of KBF with him.
These guys have shown that it can be done and all to varying degree’s. These guys are some of the ones that inspire me to work on my stuff. However, I can’t seem to decide if I want to make a web series (like Brandon Wright’s DEADSTAR series, which is made in Blender) or if I want to go down the feature film road. Decisions, decisions…
Bill Plympton produced several one man movies (well, close to one man), his latest is Cheatin (76 minutes)
My dog Tulip was done in 30 months by an animator and his wife, it was acclaimed world wide.
Romeo and Juliet, sealed with a kiss, 77 minutes flash movie animated by one person in 4 and a half years!
Voice of a distant star is a 25 minutes 3d animated movie made by one guy in 7 months, pretty decent too.
Sita sings the blues is a one woman project, one of my favorite animated movie.
And a few more…
Not too many in 3D though, probably because of the cost of hardware, for one, but also because you can cheat allot with 2D animation, while 3D is less forgiving!
This guy made a feature length CG movie flying solo. He was VFX professional and It only took him 4 years of 14 hour days, 6 days a week.
So, yes it’s possible, but takes a lot of commitment.
Thats Jeff lew Killer Bean, it was motion captured, it took him 5 years!
The guy is a lead animator, worked on several movies!
Making an animated feature would be like building a skyscraper. It’s not impossible for one man to do, but it’s certainly not feasible.
Yes its possible to create a full feature length movie solo with just Blender.
But…
A movie requires more than what Blender is designed to do. You need music, voice acting, sound effects just to name a few things. The skill sets required to deliver these aspects are very diverse, a single person is unlikely able to have sufficient skill in all the required areas.
You could produce a film that had no or few voices like Wall-E and then use free CC Music “but then its not a solo film anymore”.
It is possible though, but I would recommend you team up with some others with complimentary skills and goals. I would also suggest that before you make the film you work on a smaller project first “it could be the trailer for the film”. Just so that you can work out the production pipeline and get a handle on how long things take.
A good example might be Chirs Jones’s ‘The Passenger’. No voices, and he made the music, graphics, sound effects etc all himself. It only took 8 years to complete the 6 minutes…
You gotta keep in mind that Chris wasn’t working on The Passenger full time when he made it. So it could have been made quicker if that’s all he was doing.
Yes, you can make a very good quality movie at home, alone, but not with Blender. Use 3dsmax, and you can make a pixar quality movie at home, alone.