Blender VFX | “Spaceman” Shortfilm

This has been a long one in the making. I guess I shouldn’t put it that way, though. It took only a week or so to actually finish the work. I have just been waiting for the release of the actual short film, to get permission to post about it.

Over the last year and a half, I have had allot of opportunity to work with the Blender compositor, and it has given me the chance to learn, in detail some of the things needed, to pull off some simple effects. One of these projects was “Spaceman“. A short film by producer Holly Tuckett and writer/director Jaron Kent Hermansen. Their short film required some visual effects work, and they asked Thor Media to step in and do the job. Here is a short breakdown video of a few of the shots that I worked with.

Here are some of the compositing trees. It looks allot more complicated than it actually is. And to put in new backgrounds only takes a few steps.

First thing is to track the footage, whether the camera is moving or not. The camera is always moving, whether its the wind blowing, or the heartbeat of the camera man, the image will always move. Next is keying the green screen, and creating any masks that are needed to maintain what you want out of the original footage. And attaching those masks to the camera tracking data.

After which you build your background and attach it to your camera tracking data, and adjust to make the movement look good. Then comes any color correction, adding other effects like glows or motion blur, adding film grain, and then the final composite.

The hard part is getting the new, digitally created elements to look good with the real stuff, speaking of style and lighting. This takes allot of patience, critique from other people, and just playing around with the options that are at your disposal.

This was especially hard with this project, because most of the visual effects take place in the boy’s dream, and are meant to be exaggerated a bit. But at the same time, I had to get a look that fit with the mood and style of the story, without making it feel like the visual effects were making light of the situation.

Overall it was a very fun project to work on. Jaron and Holly at Flying Hat Productions, are great people to work with, and gave me good feedback and direction on the project. And, also, my brothers Jacob and Bryce gave great feedback and critique. I hope there are similar job like this in the future for Thor Media. Free, fun and creative.

The short film hasn’t had an official release yet, but they have trailers and all sorts of content on the film’s blog. Click on this link, http://spacemanthemovie.blogspot.com/, to learn more about the short film and it’s creators. They did a great job putting it together, and would love to see your support.