Sign In
Sign in
English

TopBanners12112603.jpg

November 26, 2012 12:00 PM
"Border" is a short that explores Blender's capability as an all-around film production tool.
Björn Sonnenschein shares his story of the potentials and limits that he discovered during the production.
 His discoveries and observations may not reflect the official views of www.BlenderNews.org.
- Editor in Chief
by Björn Sonnenschein

This is a little short film I have done recently. Visual effects and editing were done in Blender, titles and paintings were made with Gimp and Ardour and Qtractor were used for sound design.
Synopsis:
Lea addicts herself to the illusion that she could communicate with her deceased boyfriend Jens using letters. 
As an old Lady tries to beautify Jens' decayed grave put of pity, Lea's illusory world collapses because she perceives the care of the grave as a concession that Jens is actually dead. Soon Lea is confronted with her mental projection of Jens who alleges Lea that she would neglect their relationship and finally it turns out that Jens is a manifestation of Lea's feelings of guilt and tries to drive her into suicide.

Making of Border
Here are some Screenshots of my workflow:

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	1.jpg 
Views:	28 
Size:	318.9 KB 
ID:	201557
This is the whole timeline after initial editing. Every Scene a meta strip.

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	2.jpg 
Views:	24 
Size:	401.5 KB 
ID:	201558
Here we are inside a Scene. From here I exported single strips which needed to be modified separately (e.g. for Visual Effects) as raw avi files. Then the whole timeline's audio was aligned on two tracks which were exported separately so that I had gotten two audio files with non overlapping sound.

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	2b.jpg 
Views:	31 
Size:	486.2 KB 
ID:	201565
That is what a composition for a matte painting looks like.
I needed to to some rotoscoping and simplified this task by using keying where it was possible.

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	3b.jpg 
Views:	13 
Size:	376.8 KB 
ID:	201564
All effects were finished and imported into the timeline.
So it's time for tidying up the messy timeline and so getting ready for grading.

Click image for larger version. 

Name:	4b.jpg 
Views:	19 
Size:	358.1 KB 
ID:	201563
I have used the VSE to Compositor script for grading. It allowed me to send every strip to a new scene for composition with a single click and the new scene clip is inserted into my timeline above the original file automatically. In Addition, I could simply create a Node group for a node setting and the script added it to the new node trees automatically. So I could create a grading preset group and apply it to every Strip. 

After the grading was finished, I added the edited audio tracks to the timeline and rendered the video out. Well, at least I tried to do so. The first issue was the fact, that Blender's memory usage increases astronomically on larger projects and as soon as my ram + swap was full, blender crashed. Unfortunately the trick 3PointEdit wrote on his blog didn't help here.
I finally found a workaround by attaching a 100 GB external HDD and using it as a swap.

Then, after two days of rendering and then repeating this process with different codecs selected in blender I realized, that blender is not able to render to any usable and high quality codec without messing something up. ... I ended with rendering the project in H264 with the highest possible bitrate. The Result stuttered massively in every player and had no audio. I had to export the audio track manually, convert the video file with handbrake to make it playable properly and then remix it with avidemux together with separately imported audio tracks.

Related Links:
1. http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?271305-Border-Short-Film
2. http://creative.arte.tv/fr/space/Kurzfilme/message/19378/Border/
Views :
35102
Registered Date :
2012.11.27
01:34:15 (*.162.215.114)
Trackback :
http://blendernews.org/xe/2901/8ec/trackback
Article URL :
http://blendernews.org/xe/2901
List of Articles
Subject Date Views
Blender Retrospectives 2020 Blender Retrospective Feb 20, 2021 210971
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 25, 2020 563051
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 25, 2020 426159
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 431902
Tutorials Top 15 Highest-Rated Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2019 file Jan 25, 2020 375797
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 for Blender 2.8 file Jan 23, 2019 344910
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for CG, Games & Viz file Jan 23, 2019 684230
Tutorials Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 Worthy of Your Note - for Animation & VFX file Jan 23, 2019 408298
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2018 file Jan 23, 2019 344826
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2018: Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2019 381577
Blender Retrospectives 2018 Blender Retrospective file Jan 02, 2019 375965
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2017 file Jan 09, 2018 968908
Blender Retrospectives 2017 Blender Retrospective file Jan 01, 2018 696680
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2017: Winners Annouced file Dec 26, 2017 550668
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials (Videos) Released in 2016 file Jan 16, 2017 765329
Blender Retrospectives 2016 Blender Retrospective file Dec 29, 2016 1060218
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2015: Seven Winners Annouced file Jan 20, 2016 790471
Blender Retrospectives 2015 Blender Retrospective file Jan 12, 2016 762182
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2015 file Jun 26, 2015 805541
Render of the Year Render of the Year Awards 2014: Five Winners Annouced file Jan 02, 2015 813748
Tutorials Top 12 Free Online Blender Tutorials Released in 2014 file Dec 11, 2014 852622
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of December 1, 2014 file Dec 02, 2014 34854
Render of the Week 'Fear' by Reynante Martinez - the Winner of the Week of November 24, 2014 file Nov 25, 2014 40112
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of November 24, 2014 file Nov 25, 2014 36108
Render of the Week 'Cartoon Street' by Sergio Raposo Fernández - the Winner of the Week of November 17, 2014 file Nov 18, 2014 42836
Render of the Week 'Vintage Living Room' by Sergio Raposo Fernández - the Winner of the Week of September 8, 2014 file Sep 08, 2014 42215
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of November 3, 2014 file Nov 04, 2014 35984
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of November 17, 2014 file Nov 18, 2014 34769
Render of the Week 'Zigna / Real-Time' by Alessandro Chiffi - the Winner of the Week of November 10, 2014 file Nov 11, 2014 39793
Render of the Week 'Hunter's Cabin' by Robert Welling- the Winner of the Week of October 27, 2014 file Oct 28, 2014 35396
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of November 10, 2014 file Nov 11, 2014 34691
Suzanne Awards 2014 Suzanne Awards: The Winners & Nominees Are ... file Nov 03, 2014 32352
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of October 27, 2014 file Oct 28, 2014 33090
Render of the Week 'Girl' by David Norton - the Winner of the Week of October 20, 2014 file Oct 21, 2014 34634
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of October 20, 2014 file Oct 21, 2014 33335
Render of the Week 'Vixen' by Tom England - the Winner of the Week of October 13, 2014 file Oct 14, 2014 36012
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of October 13, 2014 file Oct 14, 2014 35260
Render of the Week 'Morning Snow with Berries' by Nika Maisuradze - the Winner of the Week of October 6, 2014 file Oct 07, 2014 46616
Product Visualization PRODUCT VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of October 6, 2014 file Oct 07, 2014 33693
Render of the Week 'Furniture Store' by Enrico Cerica - the Winner of the Week of September 29, 2014 file Sep 29, 2014 37717
Architectural Visualization ARCHITECTURAL VISUALIZATION IN BLENDER for the week of September 29, 2014 file Sep 29, 2014 33318