In the future the most productive and creative independent "animators" and "filmmakers" will also be programmers

Code instead of keyframes maaaaaan

So yeh finishing up this feature film here- I didn’t animate one character shot and I coded my own shitty crowd sim system and some other visual fx stuff because with C# in Unity its really easy-

Another advantage of making films inside of a game engine is that the thing was made to code- as opposed to working with a 3d application like Maya with something like Mel scripting- I know programs like Maya and Cinema 4d are programmable but its NOWHERE near as accessible as C# is in Unity-

• Make films in Unity and you can be your own T.D. AND still have enough free time in a work day to have a beer and chill out for a bit.

Coding your own film tools is exciting and everything BUT I’m a filmmaker here so I want to be able to work fast and rough so if the programming is difficult and tedious I’m not going to do it-

I want to finish shots- I want to complete sequences of the film and get them into the edit- I don’t have to wrestle with code for hours and hours-

I’m working on the last scene of the film and there’s still months to wait for the audio peoples to finish their work so I have time to do some fancier stuff for the last scene.

Here’s some visual fx kinda stuff I created today for the last scene- no keyframes were used- just some Unity assets and C#

• There’s a clay sword and I wanted to make it so if an actor swings it and hits some dolls in my crowd sims they will transform into something else- so yeh it works automatically now-

• I needed to kill a bunch of dolls with some clay tentacles, make them hover like marionettes then release them- if this was “animation” IMAGINE THE KEYFRAMES! F THE F CURVES! I wanted to make it look like the tentacles were pumping the life out of the dolls but the code would have been way too complicated for my desires right now so I ditched it because IDGAF FILMMAKING
  

In the film I need to do that with 200+ dolls at once and its worked fine in my tests-my inner cinematographer is drooling over the thought of the macro tracking shots I can get when the dolls are suspended 😮

Now compared to what is out there- these visual fx are nothing special BUT I’m not just a mere designer that only exists to make things look cool for no real reason 😄

I’m the storyteller/director etc with this film and these visual fx abilities are in my grasp- the more skills you have, each one becomes a force multiplier when it comes to creating things like animated films-

So these aren’t random fx- they are part of the story and the world I created- It’s hard for me to explain how exciting it is when you can control all this stuff on your own 😲

I just realized I haven’t posted anything about the “art” or “story” side of things-

I feel like writing about my “thoughts” and “feelings” about the film can ruin it for other people so I’m not going to write/say anything about it- people will be able to watch it to experience the art of it-

I’m writing on the internet about workflow stuff and technical things as that might be useful to someone in the future who might also be creating things- it’s data not feelings-

There’s nothing wrong with feelings maaaan- just yeah, you can watch/listen/experience my creations if you want to know how I feel as talking about it just seems pointless to me-

In other future news- I registered Imagination Rabbit as an on chain LLC with Otoco awhile back and they are continuing to add features. I’m really interested to see how they handle the EIN/Bank account stuff with an “on chain” company 🤨

I’m going to be using NFT’s in a way I haven’t seen before with this film. I’ll probably contact a bunch of the NFT sites and see if they want to do a promo thing with it because if you mint an NFT and no one is there to promote it does it even exist? If none of them want to do anything with it I’ll do it myself anyway.

If you are into Unity and Cryptocurrency stuff check out this dudes Youtube channel- he created a package for Unity that allows you to connect to Metamask and work with NFT’s etc- really cool stuff.

• now back to being a filmmaking and working on shots!