Well… I admit that sounds a tad too dramatic :)

For the past year I’ve been working with a bunch of really talented artists here at my school on the concept, story and look of an animated short film. It’s been a very demanding year for me, both on the personal and artistic side of things (often they’re the same). Finally it’s time to go public!

OMEGA is a stop motion animated short movie which uses state of the art digital photography and high end CG to bring a unique, lively and complex look to the screen. The film will be somewhere around 8 minutes long, at the moment consisting of over 150 shots. You can read more about the movie on our temporary production blog. Make sure you check out the gallery with production stills and concepts. From time to time we’ll try to post updates of our current progress, pics from the studio and crazy sleep-deprived people… exciting times ahead!

For me this project is somewhat of a departure from pure digital art, which poses a much welcomed challenge to me… especially after kicking computers around for over a decade. I absolutely love stop motion and generally everything about animation.  Also for this project I’ve had the chance to draw crazy things, which is always fun.

An interesting detail of course for the Blender crowd is that we’ll be using Blender 2.5 to composite the entire movie (terrabytes of 3K Digital film footage). Some of the (larger) creatures and spaceships will be animated in 3D as well. Alongside with durian we hope to test and evaluate the Blender compositing pipeline in a real production environment. The somewhat cryptic results of our pipeline tests (digital SLR cam > computer > image conversion > offline processing > online processing > compositing) were posted some time ago here.

Anyways, there’s too much information to fit into one silly post, so without further ado…

OMEGA

.andy

There was an audio issue with the environment modeling and lighting file. roughly 8 minutes into the timelapse, the audio stopped, but continued after a time. this was caused by a sequence audio strip (yes, i actually used the blender sequencer to edit down 30 hours of video!) that had accidentally been hidden at conversion time.

now you can finally find a fixed version on the blender e-shop page (direct link to the .ogg)

edit: link works (again)

many apologies for the error!

.andy

edit: gee, yeah. of course… these are photos! (actually still frames…). suzanne is curtesy of the fellas at zomgwtf3d.com