Announcing 'Singularity'

Hello and welcome to our first short film project of 2025!

If you've been following our past projects, you saw that over time we've been gathering a variety of painterly/NPR tools and setups, most prominently the Brush Stroke Tools that Simon created for Project Gold. 'Singularity' will be our next project to stress-test and expand this tool-set.

So what is it about?

I started writing the story almost 3 years ago. What started out as a mix of 'Land Before Time' and 'Interstellar' over time shape-shifted into something else! When we had the opportunity to pitch new project for this year, I shortened the script and made it fit the time frame we had available. The log-line reads like this:

Our story takes place in a distant age of the universe, when the stars and galaxies were young. When an ominous cosmic event swallows the icy home of a small space critter, he must find refuge among a group of luminous creatures watched over by a mysterious celestial being.

Without spoiling the story too much, the style of the film will be quite colorful and painterly with stylized fantastic creatures in space. It will be a bit scary, so I wouldn't recommend it for kids below the age of 8. The current animatic is about 5:30 long, I expect it to stay in that ballpark.

A bunch of very cheap early "Storybook" thumbnail drawings I did last year.

I did a story-book slide show to pitch the project to our team while Vivien started with some first creature explorations. Luckily the pitch was received very well and over the past months I've been slowly putting together a full animatic of the film, featuring temporary character models and a very crude environment.

Very early character explorations by Vivien

What's gonna happen next?

In the coming month we will work on the visual style of the film as well as character and environment design. Beau is currently working on some amazing environment explorations. Hjalti is helping with the previs, while Vivien is going to focus on the art direction of the project! Rik and Pablico have started with animation tests and soon we will start to see the first final character models! Most of the style constraints are already set: We will use painterly brushstrokes and the animation will happen on 2s like for Project Gold. Next we will start the Layout process which will prepare shots to be animated. The core production of the project will take 4 months, while lighting and rendering will most likely stretch out a bit further.

Meanwhile, Beau has been doing some environment explorations.

What new cool stuff can we expect?

More brush strokes: We will be creating more brush stroke style packs, textures and shading setups for a unique painterly look that you are welcome to use in your own projects.

Simulation and crowds: We will have swarms of creatures with tendrils, wings and tentacles, a bit too much to animate by hand. In addition to providing tools for our animators to quickly create movement along paths, we are aiming to simulate crowd behavior using Geometry Nodes.

4K HDR: We are planning to author the movie in 4K for its online release and we are working together with the VSE developers to allow Blender to easily grade (which was possible but now we can actually see the preview!) and output HDR video for our online release later this year. You will get to test those features hopefully at the same time as us!

And of course we will stress test new features as we will be using 5.x in production, we will continue to develop the Blender Studio Tools and production pipeline.

The animatic edit in it's current shape and form. This will definitely grow by a few channels over the course of the project!

Follow our progress in the coming months in our Production Logs and on the Blender Studio Log!