2. No Space!

As is the case with most personal projects, they take a very, very, very long time to complete. Sometimes this is because of the ambition of the project, but for me personally, its because we're normally trying to make these while working full-time and spending time with the family, so you end up grabbing a few hours here and a few there to keep the project moving forward. Sometimes if there is downtime in work we jump on it but those are few and far between. For example the last film we made, called "Remote", took just over 5 years from start to finish and it was only 2 minutes long! If anyone is interested you can watch it here...

Remote from The Garden Shed Films on Vimeo.

No Space! came about because the company had an open brief for anyone to come up with some new ideas for an internal project, and even though this idea wasn't really suitable for what they wanted, I liked it enough to develop it further. It's a pretty simple story about a couple of ultra competitive space explorers who keep getting in each others way, so we fleshed out a thumbnail storyboard of the whole film pretty quickly.

The story felt pretty solid but the following week I was burgled and my bag containing the storyboards was pinched in the process. Luckily it was all still pretty fresh and it didn't take long to re-board it. I made several copies, digitized them and saved copies everywhere just in case that thieving bugger came back.

The next step in the process was to make an animatic. Normally you make them in 2D using the storyboards but because there was quite a lot of action and camera movement, and my drawing skills aren't the best it made more sense to make this in 3D where we ended up with a kind of animatic/previs of the film.

The animatic and storyboards will not be put on this blog because we don't want to reveal anything about the story , but we plan to show everything else, from character and prop designs, to animation tests and all the Unreal Engine gubbins.

Finally, I should mention that we've actually been working on this film for quite a while to date, albeit moving at a snails pace, but it does feel like its gathering momentum now which is why we've set up this blog, which will allow us to update it more often than we otherwise would.