Attempting to produce a student short within Unreal 4; we need your advices !
polycounter lvl 9
Hello Polycounters. I need your advices and on opinions on something me and my friend have been talking about for some time now.
We are currently progressing through our Bachelor in 3D computer animation (Though he studies in the game branch and I am studying in Cinema and VFX as I am learning game engines at home).
Before entering university(both of us will be graduating next year) , we completed a 3 years course in CEGEP (it's like pre-university in French Canada) and 3D and we learned the basics there (which helped us prepare our portfolio to get accepted in the university course).
To complete the 3 years course in CEGEP, students had to produce short films on their own.
This is my short:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDAD5z5GuvU[/ame]
and this is his.
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxXPgU3FsxQ[/ame]
2 different types of movie but anyway..
Whatever you think of it, I can assure you that we greatly improved and learned from our mistakes. He's the modeling/texturing/lighting guy and I'm more the rigging/animation type.
Basically, as we are progressing through our academic studies, we hardly have any time to focus on our own projects and since we have so much hoemworks to do in general 3D matters that doesn't interest us (Compositing/pre-rendering for me and he dislikes rigging/animation classes) it's hard for us to complete our port-folios with what we want to specialize in.
To solve that we thought that we could team up and work on a little short this summer within Unreal 4. He'd be the modeler/texturer and I would work on the rigging and the animation.
We're currently working on the design/story and sketches (Pre-production) so we'd work on the production this summer. So no problem till now ecept....
1-We'd have to work part time during summer and there's no way we'd be able to finish it. Add to that the fact that we'd be freaking broke when we'd get back to school with our part-time revenue and we barely would be able to pay our students fees and tuitions!
2-Even though I won the prize for best animated student short in front of her, my mom doesn't seem to care about my studies and WOULD HATES to see me work in front of my computer all summer (especially if I bring no income in the house!)
The only reason I pursued university is because of her ( I originally wanted to work on my folio at home). In our culture, diplomas are everything so she doesn't care when I tell here it's not necessary.
SO basically, you see 2 problems here but it's actually merged into one: lack of money.
Both could be solved if we'd gain a sufficient income during that time.
My mother depise to see me work on 3D stuff all day lonf (She's a good person but no matter how hard I try to explain her, she simply sees no future in it) however If could show that I can gain money from it, she'd probably understand my case, with that same money, me and my friend would pay our school general expanses.
The problem is, where do we get that money? I've proposed the idea of crowdfunding (I know these sites are being overused now for any little stuff) but even though our project is serious, he thinks it woudn't work since nobody woudnt be interested to fund a student short.
I thought about using; maybe not kickstarter but smaller personal sites like this one:
http://www.gofundme.com/
or this
https://www.indiegogo.com/explore/art
https://rally.org/
We'd ask about 2000-3000$ (is that too much?) explaining our project and the issues behind it. If we manage to bring solid pre-production design explainning the themes behind our short, maybe it could work? Plus, once the movie'd be finished, we'd make vids of ''behind the scene'' and such explaing to people what are the pits and traps making a short with student's knowledge.
What do you think?
Another problem behind this is that we do not own Maya and Max, we only use the educational licenses,maybe the question seems stupid but is this considred as commercial work? In this instance, we'd have to give up the whole idea then...
Maybe it's just better to forget about all this and get ourselves those good ol student retails/fast-good job (I'm really fed up with these sincerely).
Need your opinions here.
We are currently progressing through our Bachelor in 3D computer animation (Though he studies in the game branch and I am studying in Cinema and VFX as I am learning game engines at home).
Before entering university(both of us will be graduating next year) , we completed a 3 years course in CEGEP (it's like pre-university in French Canada) and 3D and we learned the basics there (which helped us prepare our portfolio to get accepted in the university course).
To complete the 3 years course in CEGEP, students had to produce short films on their own.
This is my short:
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDAD5z5GuvU[/ame]and this is his.
[ame]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxXPgU3FsxQ[/ame]2 different types of movie but anyway..
Whatever you think of it, I can assure you that we greatly improved and learned from our mistakes. He's the modeling/texturing/lighting guy and I'm more the rigging/animation type.
Basically, as we are progressing through our academic studies, we hardly have any time to focus on our own projects and since we have so much hoemworks to do in general 3D matters that doesn't interest us (Compositing/pre-rendering for me and he dislikes rigging/animation classes) it's hard for us to complete our port-folios with what we want to specialize in.
To solve that we thought that we could team up and work on a little short this summer within Unreal 4. He'd be the modeler/texturer and I would work on the rigging and the animation.
We're currently working on the design/story and sketches (Pre-production) so we'd work on the production this summer. So no problem till now ecept....
1-We'd have to work part time during summer and there's no way we'd be able to finish it. Add to that the fact that we'd be freaking broke when we'd get back to school with our part-time revenue and we barely would be able to pay our students fees and tuitions!
2-Even though I won the prize for best animated student short in front of her, my mom doesn't seem to care about my studies and WOULD HATES to see me work in front of my computer all summer (especially if I bring no income in the house!)
The only reason I pursued university is because of her ( I originally wanted to work on my folio at home). In our culture, diplomas are everything so she doesn't care when I tell here it's not necessary.
SO basically, you see 2 problems here but it's actually merged into one: lack of money.
Both could be solved if we'd gain a sufficient income during that time.
My mother depise to see me work on 3D stuff all day lonf (She's a good person but no matter how hard I try to explain her, she simply sees no future in it) however If could show that I can gain money from it, she'd probably understand my case, with that same money, me and my friend would pay our school general expanses.
The problem is, where do we get that money? I've proposed the idea of crowdfunding (I know these sites are being overused now for any little stuff) but even though our project is serious, he thinks it woudn't work since nobody woudnt be interested to fund a student short.
I thought about using; maybe not kickstarter but smaller personal sites like this one:
http://www.gofundme.com/
or this
https://www.indiegogo.com/explore/art
https://rally.org/
We'd ask about 2000-3000$ (is that too much?) explaining our project and the issues behind it. If we manage to bring solid pre-production design explainning the themes behind our short, maybe it could work? Plus, once the movie'd be finished, we'd make vids of ''behind the scene'' and such explaing to people what are the pits and traps making a short with student's knowledge.
What do you think?
Another problem behind this is that we do not own Maya and Max, we only use the educational licenses,maybe the question seems stupid but is this considred as commercial work? In this instance, we'd have to give up the whole idea then...
Maybe it's just better to forget about all this and get ourselves those good ol student retails/fast-good job (I'm really fed up with these sincerely).
Need your opinions here.
Replies
I am not sure this would count as commercial because if it is for your portfolio and with no intent to sell then you would be able to use your educational licenses.
Looking for stress-free part time jobs seems a lot more feasible to me.
Also from the outside it seems like your mother can be reasoned with, after all you are studying what you wanted to study.
Perhaps some low level freelancing? I'm not really aware of the current situation out there, because I have been working for the same clients for years, only heard it apparently got a bit rougher. But it can't pay worse than some random summer job. But maybe it does drain your creative energy to sit at your computer all day and then continue for your own project.