 Hello! Good morning, Blender Conference. I hope you're all awake. This is day three, so all of our brains are melting. I hope you have plenty of coffee. I'm running on about six right now, so I think it's going to be a good talk. I'm pumped. I'm really excited to be here. I just wanted to start off by saying thank you to everyone for being here today to hear the talk, and also everybody that's watching online. And most importantly, the Blender Foundation. You guys are amazing. We wouldn't be here without you. Thank you for an amazing piece of software, an amazing conference. It's been really, really, really great to be here. Thank you for the invitation to speak. My name is Chris Bailey. I've run a YouTube channel. I do lots of crazy stuff. But what we're going to talk about today is short filmmaking. What it is, how to do it. We're going to talk about sequences, which sequences are like short films inside bigger films. And that's what I do for my living, is I make sequences. And it's a really exciting tool, Blender, to be using to make sequences. And I'm pumped because we're going to talk about first a big overview of sort of camera work. How do you make cameras tell a sequence, tell a story in a sequence in a really efficient, really effective way. We're going to just kind of do sort of a big overview of that. And then we're going to dive in and we're going to talk specifically about a way of using Blender to make short films or to make sequences in larger films that I personally find incredibly exciting because it's non-destructive and it's non-linear. And I don't think anybody's actually mentioned it or talked about it yet. So I'm pretty pumped. I'm hoping that by the end of this talk you'll have some aha moments that you can take away from. So like I said, I run a YouTube channel with lots of videos. Please go watch them, like and subscribe, do all that stuff. And here's a little trailer for the channel. So we can have the lights dimmed and I'll play this. This has audio so you can get a taste. Blow in, welcome to another exciting Blender tutorial. I'm loving it. So there you go. No shortage of... Thank you very much. No shortage of ego there. Tutorials that will blow your mind. This channel came out of a desire to make cinematic stuff and break it down for people. Make it really simple. And try to teach the process of making cinematic shots and sequences using Blender. So it's really what the channel's been about. I also started doing stuff with CG Cookie a few years ago so you may have seen some of my work with them. And then out of YouTube I got the opportunity a few years ago to begin working with Animal Logic. Animal Logic's a really amazing film studio in Sydney, Australia where I live. They've been making movies for a very, very long time and amazing pedigree of stuff. But they started using Blender, which was very exciting. And so they invited me to partner with them to begin to develop their Blender experience. They helped bring them into the world of Blender. And it's been an absolute privilege to do that for me. Very exciting. So what I do at Animal is I am a pre-viz artist. So I am helping their team get used to Blender, figure out how to use it. And also then I'm working a small team on a brand new feature film, a very exciting, very big movie that I can't talk about at all. And I'm doing pre-viz in that film. And what is pre-viz? Pre-viz is short filmmaking. It's basically taking a bunch of toys, so the assets the art department has been making and putting together the sets and the characters and things. And you get the script, right? And you go and you say, okay, you know, Chris, you're doing this bit. This is your sequence. And so you take this section of the script. There's some storyboards to work off of. Maybe a rough edit to help you to guide the process. But ultimately it's up to you to block the characters, do some breakdown poses, some key poses for the characters, and figure out where the cameras are going to go and how you're going to tell the story at that point in the movie. It's a really exciting and fun process. But it requires a kind of fluidity of sandbox mentality that is really difficult in animation. But thankfully with Blender it's becoming so accessible, so incredibly easy to play. And that's kind of the big focus of what we're going to talk about. It's how Blender enables you to engage in the sandbox of play. Because when you can engage in play, when you're creating sequences, you're set free. So traditionally animation has been brutal. You have to commit to stuff. And if you make a change later on down the track, it's painful to go back. It's so difficult and expensive and prohibitive. And so when you're doing previs, you really need to be able to whip stuff up quickly. You've got to put a whole sequence together, and then we pitch it to the director. And right now I get to pitch to this director that's like a legend, he's a hero of mine, and one of those guys with a lot of little gold statues, very intimidating to talk to. And you present your sequence, and then you hold your breath and you get the feedback, and then you go back and you retool your sequence and you put it together. So it's been really fun to use Blender at that level and to be able to present that kind of work in that kind of environment. Now, with sequences, what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about this short film that I've been making on YouTube. Now one of the things that I've always wanted to do, and I'm finally going to do it, is to make a short film from beginning to end live on YouTube. So I've been created the story as a tutorial. I talked about how to write a story for a short film, and I broke down that process as a tutorial. Then I started making all the assets, and everything's a tutorial. You can actually go watch it. It's all free. It's all on YouTube. There's a playlist if you can hunt it down. And then what I started to do is animate the film and actually make the film in these live streams and in these uncut recordings. So like hour-long sessions where I'd sit down, pick up the scene, and just go for it. So the goal is when the film is all finished to have the entire thing documented. So you can watch if you're, you know, crazy enough to sit down for that long in front of YouTube. You can watch the entire process of making this tiny little short film. Keep it really simple. So I'm going to use this as our talking point, our case study today to talk about these concepts since I can't share anything about the film that I'm working on, but you'll still get the idea. So here's the first scene of the film, which is finally done. I'm halfway through the second scene, and then there's three scenes in the movie, so it'll be done. Hopefully early next year is my goal. I'm not in any rush to finish this, but let's have a look at this, and then we'll talk about the process. So if we could dim the lights again and we'll get some audio. The first thing I ask when I'm approaching a sequence is, okay, what's the change in this scene and what's the point of view? It's like two of the most important things. There's always a narrative beat change. Sometimes there's two in a sequence, sometimes a few more, but you want to figure out what is going to change in the story. When you pin that down, you get to ask the question, whose point of view do I need to put the audience in? Who's the audience need to be empathizing with and relating to? Those two things inform all the choices you begin to make from that point forward as you sculpt the sequence. What you can see here in the short, so the point of view that I'm working on in this one is, play, back, play, back, back, play. There, that's how it works. Okay, so, sorry, we don't need to watch this one. I will get to this in a second. So the point of view of this sequence that you just watched is the little droid character, the tiny guy, you know, that kind of sneaks off and nips off. So I'm thinking about his point of view and I'm thinking about the key change in this scene, which is the surprise of when the floor opens up underneath him and he drops. So I want to make sure that I capture that beat. You'd be surprised how easy it is to miss the most important beat in your scene when you're putting something together. If you've made a short film or you've directed anything, you'll know that, like, when you first do it, you often get in the edit room and you realize that you forgot to film the most important part of your sequence. So it's actually really important to sit down. I keep up doing this so many times. I've completely missed what matters. So it's really important to make a note of it. Now, here's some basic ideas of how to build a good sequence. You want to always ask the question, where is your audience's eye? So your job as a filmmaker is to juggle the eye of your audience. You're playing, you're moving them around, you're keeping them engaged in the sequence. This is very important, especially in action, when things are going really fast. You want to know where your audience is looking. So right now I know in this shot, my audience is looking there at laser pointer, that guy, right? So I want to make sure that my next shot keeps the focal point, the most important thing, in the same spot on the frame. That means that there's no moment where the viewer has to search for what they're supposed to look for. And when you're cutting between shots, it's really important that you keep that consistent so they know where they're at and they don't get lost and they're able to just keep getting that information. So that's super important. Lens variety, another good tip. Change up the size of your lenses so you start with the wide. You go for like a 14mm or something and then you cut into something a bit closer. You do like a 25mm or a 50mm. And keeping that variety is really, really key. It's okay if this one doesn't play, so don't stress. So yeah, here you can see. So we're cutting in to a tighter lens. And then we cut in a bit wider and we go to this POV where a different size lens and then we're back to him. So keeping that variety, what that does is it helps your edit to feel a bit more organic, a bit more, you don't notice the edit as much. It feels more natural. You don't have jump cuts. Cuts don't feel very harsh when you're changing up your lens size. Next thing is screen direction. This is filmmaking 101. You want to keep people in the, your subject matter in the same size of the screen that they belong. So the red light here gets over on the right of frame and then he's over on the left and he's looking at it. So I've established this is the direction. I want to keep him over here, always now. I want to keep this over here, always. So this lives in the right, this guy lives in the left. So if I cut to an over the shoulder of the light, you can see I've kept him in the left and I've kept the light on the right. This keeps everybody oriented in the scene, so they don't get lost. If I cut to a reverse, he's still on the same side of the screen. So I've keeping him there and he's looking where the light lives. The light lives on the right side of the screen. So that consistency is really important because if you break that, it gets really confusing. You go like, okay, so what's he looking like? And now it feels like he's turned his head in that kind of feel that, that cut. It feels like he's changing his perspective, right? So that's the effect. You can lose your audience. If everyone's looking in different places and you're like, what is going on with this scene? I don't know. So that's how you can solve that. So screen direction is super important. And then finally, camera movement across cuts. So when you've got a camera move, so like a really nice dramatic, you know, move, you want to make sure the next shot you go to is also moving, okay? And then if that shot you want to go to a shot that's still, you want to make sure that shot comes to a stop first. Okay, so bring it to a stop and then you cut to another still shot. And if you want to make things move again, you can make that one start to move. And if you're still moving on your cut, you want to make sure your next shot is also moving like this across the stage, right? So that's really important. So keep the movement going. It's one of those rules you can break, but it is a really good one to keep in mind. It keeps things flowing well. Okay, so how do we actually make this stuff? How do you make a short film? How do you make a sequence? I always start with storyboards. And Paul did a great talk on storyboards. If you didn't catch that, I encourage you to watch it online on YouTube. It's up there. So first step for me, whenever I'm doing these boards, I create a blank grease pencil object. I switch to draw mode. Very important. Don't forget that step. And then I turn on sync to audio. Oh my gosh, this is so important. If you forget to do this, I can really scrap down this. I've forgotten to sync to audio. This will play at, you know, 24 frames a second or whatever your FPS is consistently. Even if your performance is bad on your computer and you start dropping frames, make sure you do that. Then you can get a sense of timing. And then what I do is I turn on auto keying. Next step. Very important. Auto keying. Because that does is whenever you draw a new frame in your space, it will, you know, delete everything that's there and it will create a fresh drawing for you. And so what you can do is you can quickly scrub through your timeline and draw. And you don't have to worry about, like, managing if you delete everything first or whatever. You just draw, draw, draw. And every drawing becomes a new frame. And then you've got these lovely keyframes on your dope sheet. And you can actually time your edit now. You can start to edit by just grabbing the summary keyframe, moving it around. And this is how I plan out a sequence. I'll draw it and I'll create this full animatic. And I get, basically when I'm done, I've got an edit of my movie. I've got an entire edit. I know exactly kind of how long I want each shot to go. I know basically what I wanted to have happen. You can see the film that you just watched, you know, it's all playing out. And you just move those keyframes. It's the same as moving your edit markers. Okay. So this is very effective. So then I export this and I bring it in as a reference. Now, I just wanted to give one little tiny workflow tip. There's been a lot of workflow stuff at the conference today, so I won't dwell on this, but one really great tip that I like for making collections clear when I'm working in a team and we need to link and append stuff in is you can see I've got this droid asset that I've made. And right up here, I've got this little double dash arrow thing. And that's just sort of a token that my team and I, we agree on, this is what means, this is the collection to import. Okay. So that way if I've got like a hundred of collections and thousands of setup things and I've dragged everything in it, I can make sure that the most important thing that someone needs to bring in is always going to be in the one with that little arrow. So that way when they go to import, they go to append, they go to collection, and up there it is, it's always going to pop up at the top and it's always super clear which one is the correct one. So this is kind of a version control thing that I really like to do. It's simple and it works. So I'd recommend doing that. All right, let's talk about the most exciting part for me at least, the nonlinear filmmaking. This is so cool. Okay. I hope you guys think it's cool. What do I mean by nonlinear filmmaking? Okay. So you've got your storyboards. You're figuring out your sequence, creating cameras, you're positioning them in your scene, you've got your characters. What I do is I create a new camera and then I'll look through that camera. I'll click the little camera icon next to the name. Click. And then I'll come over and I'll control B to bind camera to marker. So we've talked about that. You've heard that before. So this is how I create an edit. I start to create all these different cameras from my shots and you can grab those markers and move them around and you can begin to refine how the edit feels. I go, okay, I like this close up or I like this wide, but I feel like it needs to be a little shorter and so I can, you know, you move those markers around. You just keep playing, right? So you're creating this live edit. Now, of course, when you're making a film, you know, it's not like live TV, right? Where you can just animate all the action and then you can just cut to different cameras and stuff. That doesn't really work. You need to jump time. You need to have, you know, weird cheats where your characters move. So you end up with a lot of keyframes. And on these cut points, right, that you've created with your camera, you tend to cheat stuff like you'll move the character over a bit for this particular shot and then you'll move it and it gets really messy. So you think, oh, I can't make any changes, but you can. What you do is you hit I on the dub sheet and you select all channels and this will insert a keyframe for everything that already has a keyframe on it. So it's like you're kind of locking the position. And then you set it to free handles and that'll preserve your curves if you've done really careful curves. If you move these keyframes apart now, it won't break anything. Then you select all your cameras and you go and you can select all that's after the current frame and then you make on, make sure that sync markers is turned on. Sync markers is magic. I love this tool. If you hit G to grab, you move your keyframes and all those cameras will pop and stay in sync with those keyframes. So I've just created a gap here in my edit. I've gone, oh, you know, I'm going to add 20 frames to this bit and I haven't wrecked anything. And then I'm scaling it. I'm like, you know, I'm going to slow it all down. So I scale it and those markers just stay in sync with the keyframes. So suddenly it's like you're using a nonlinear editor to animate. It's incredible. Like, oh my gosh, who's thought of this? Are they here? Can you put your hand up? I want to give you a hug after this talk. It's like the best thing ever. So being able to move your keys around like that means you're never getting a situation where you're like, I really need six more frames at the end of this shot, but there is no way I can add it because, oh my gosh, the domino chain this is going to set off, if I move this one thing, it's going to break everything and ruin my sequence. You don't have to worry about it anymore. As long as you hit I to set a key for all those channels, set them to free for the handle and then you sync markers, you can move it. Now make sure you turn sync markers off. It can really catch you out if you're not careful with that because if it's turned on and you grab one key frame and you've got like 20 cameras selected and you don't realize it and you grab that one key frame, all those cameras are going to move with you. So that is a bit of a, so look out for that, but if you can remember that much, it works out really, really well, but there's more that you can do with this. So check this out. This next thing I'm going to do, I've got a point in my sequence where I'm like, I really like this close-up and I want to have this close-up earlier. I don't like it here in my sequence. So, you know, let's move it. So we, you know, set a key frame for all the channels just like I just showed. Go to the next cut point, key frame for all channels. Then we select the key frames. We will select them. It's not as easy or too to collapse everything. It can be overwhelming to see all these key frames. So you can just collapse down to the summary view. I also make sure I've got only shows selected turned off and show hidden always turned on. I've always keep those on. So here I am, I select the keys and that particular shot and I just shift D, duplicate, drag them back to that gap that we created earlier. And then I grab the camera marker, shift D, grab that and bring it back so that it's a cut point. And then I just bring the key frames up so that those, that cut point that I created lines up with the next one. And what happens is suddenly it's like I'm able to cut to this completely different moment that I have animated way later in my film. I've now brought it up and it works. And it didn't break the animation before the animation after and those curves are still just the way they were. So what this does is it basically allows you to create shots with absolute freedom and you can grab and move them around. Now some of the gotchas with this that you need to be aware of I really recommend that you don't use the NLA editor, don't use the nonlinear animation editor. If you do, bake your animation and then get it in your sequence. And the reason for that is NLA is great for like blending lots of different complex animation strips but it's not accessible in your dope sheet. And so if you can bake it back out the key frames, you've got it in your dope sheet which means that you can continue to working in this way. So that's kind of one catch. You really can't use the NLA if you're going to be doing this. But it's fine. I don't really miss the NLA in terms of a constant state. Like it's fine to bake stuff down for. But pretty much everything other than that works really, really well. And if you have a situation where you need to actually export individual shots, well, we'll get to that actually. We'll talk about that. So let's talk about some other stuff. I've got no idea how I'm doing for time. I should probably check that at some point. Just excuse me. I'll just turn things. Yeah, we're fine. So instance lighting. So I like to light individual shots uniquely. Like I like to have a, I do kind of one big master light for my set. And then what I do, I put all those lights in a collection and I give that collection name like master light setup or something. And then I create collections for every camera and I take the name of the camera and I paste it into my collection so they match. It's easy to see the difference. And then I start to do these custom light setups, right? So I light this specific shot. Now, once you've done that, one of the big problems is you end up with like hundreds of lights, right? And you have different lights for different shots and you're cutting to those shots. And if you want to set a key frame for all those lights to like turn them on or off, it's a lot of key frames. And it's a pain and it takes like 20 minutes just to, you know, first you key the viewport, bup, bup, bup, bup. And then you key the camera, bup, bup, bup, bup, bup. And then you key the eye for some reason. You're like, I don't need to key the eye because I did the viewport, you know. But if you finally get it all down, it's a lot of work to manage. So the quicker way to do it is first set your cursor to world origin. This is important because if you don't, what you're about to do it appears off wherever the cursor is. Then you want to turn on always show hidden so you don't, you know, lose the ones that have disappeared. And then you take one of your lighting collections for a shot and you right click on it and you go instance to scene. And this will create an instance of that collection. And then you hide that collection with the lights and you go down to the instance to version and you key frame the visibility. Very easy. It's great. So now you've got a collection that is exactly the same, lights it in the same way and you can turn it on and off with just one set of key frames whenever you want for every shot. And then once it's in your dub sheet you're now able to move it around with everything else in your nonlinear editor workflow and you're able to light individual scenes and it works really, really well. So if you want to do multiple takes I recommend using scenes so you can go up and create multiple in a different scene and break it out. You can do a variation. This also works good if you want to export individual shots with handles, right? So if you don't want to be restricted by, you've got an edit that works really well. You export it from that. Great. But then I also want to do a few of my shots with handles. You can break them out into a master scene. You can just create either a link copy or a full copy and then delete all the markers off your timeline. You can even delete the cameras out of that and if it's a full copy and just output from the timeline the specific frames you want for whatever that shot is so your editor can do more with it. Or in my case in this short film I am the editor so I'm just keeping the edit in Blender in the timeline as I'm working. And that works really well. This is also important for a motion blur can be a problem on this because if you're doing it this format, you know, if you cut to a different shot and you've got your character over here and then suddenly he's over here because the framing's a bit better you're going to get a weird motion blur frame. So that's where you would want to break these out and do the handles so you don't end up with those bizarre moments. So all of that stuff together really works to make a really fluid organic process and it enables you to play and that's probably the most important thing. And what I wanted to leave you guys with a lot was, you know, very much in filmmaking it's very similar to in life, right? You start out with a goal you're going to make this film and you have this idea and you think it's a straight path just like in life. You know, I want this job or I want to do this thing with Blender it's going to be a straight path, right? Sure. Of course not. It's never a straight path. Filmmaking's never a straight path. It's a wandering, meandering path with double backs and, you know, splits and dead ends and all this stuff happens and you have to be willing to embrace that journey. And I think that we overemphasize finishing way too much. Starting is so much more important than finishing because if you never start anything you're never going to finish anything. And so I'd encourage you to get into Blender and play and get really good at starting things because if you can do that then you're going to have that moment when you do finish something and you need to create that opportunity and that space for yourself. So try not to discourage yourself from not finishing things and celebrate the starts that you do and if you start things like I've started this short film and hopefully you'll finish it and hopefully I'll finish this short film and I really hope that you join me for the journey and you come watch it with me over on YouTube as I do it so check it out. Thank you so much for listening to my talk and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your conference. Catch me afterwards.