Dama Bete - Já (3d music video)

I’ve been working extremely hard, not sleeping much to accomplish one of my dreams: a 3D animation or short movie, that I completed! It’s one of my greatest achievements because I worked on this one by myself, everyday for three months, everyday after my full-time job.

My vision was very clear in my, so I started by drawing some sketches and created the whole storyboard quite quickly. The goal was to create a music video for “Dama Bete - Já” that I’ve produced (instrumental); So, I knew the song quite well.

The label (Universal Music Records) didn’t have much money for the video, so I end up working on it for nothing; I do know that they paid quite a lot of money for a video that took 2 days to shoot and edit; But this is how it works in Portugal, you work a lot for nothing, regardless of how talented you might be, or what you can acomplish.

Find more original sketches at the bottom to understand the process

I did everything, created the 3d models, textures, lighthing setup, rigging, animation, node composition, rendering and finally, editing and colour grading.

The video part was a challenge I made to “Dama Bete”, to use a very cheap Chinese camera, as I wanted to make sure the video was done inspiring, to make sure people know they can do quite a lot with the cheapest equipment or material available.

Do It Yourself, Punk attitude, be yourself, just do it, kind of thing…! Trust your guts.

All the software that I’ve used, including the operating system was Open Source; I worked with Blender 3d (been using it since 2003 and I’m also a big fan of Ton Roosendaal and the whole Blender Foundation), on Linux Ubuntu. To compute all the work, I used an external service provider called ResPower by Early Ehlinger;

There were some gimmicks and techniques I had to learn to speed up the process and keep it as cheap as possible, because I’m completely broke; all the money I make on my full-time job is to pay for my University course :(

By the way, the service I purchased is called Super Blender Bronze. There’s also Silver and Gold, so I have the lowest priority on the queue but it’s been working out for me and the waiting times are not too long.

Most jobs in the renderfarm were split by parts and rendered in separate frames. That I then import to the NLE, that generates the sequence automatically - this works because Blender has an option that creates filenamed sequentially.

By rendering by split frames, it’s also easy to spot frames that are blank or have issues (this happened a lot, actually use some renders with imperfections because I couldn’t afford to re-render); I believe it worked out, because of the way I made it look in post-production and colour grading, etc.

Waiting Frames    :0
Processing Frames :0
Complete Frames   :250
Aborted Frames    :0
Dead Frames       :2
Total Frames      :250

I end up deciding to crop the original 4:3, and made it fit 16:9, so lost some stuff but here’s the final result:

Oh! Did I tell you that I did all this on a 350 Euros laptop that my sister found for me at a supermarket? This is my first laptop, ever :)