For part of this project, I will be creating a short promotional video, with shots around ‘the scene’ to advertise each product in situ. Please refer to my ‘photo shoot’ post, where I illustrate the storyboard, and further discuss existing examples and camera placement.

To get basic knowledge about how the camera works in blender, I watched this tutorial:

This tutorial discuss how you can change the camera properties and lens to create different looks. For example, you can decrease the camera lens focal to ‘8’, giving the lens a fish eye effect, depending on what your project is about. Furthermore, you can increase the camera lens focal to convey a more flat effect if preferred. Furthermore, by using the ‘shift’ tool, you are able to make simple movements with the camera, without being drastic and therefore making the shot more professional. The ‘clipping’ tool is quite interesting as it has a function of limiting what is seen. The clipping tool can cut out parts of the back ground so that the rendering and camera shooting can focus on the foreground.

This video was helpful in terms of learning how the camera works, however, I need to understand how you can make the camera move. Therefore, I found the tutorial below useful as the camera movements Enigma Toots delivers, are similar to how I desire my video to be:

A limitation of this video is that it doesn’t show you how to add multiple cameras, and perhaps add key frames in order to get several camera videos from one scene. Furthermore, Enigma Toots does not tell you how to make a short films per say, more how to enable motion in the camera. Moreover, I need to further find out how to use several cameras in blender, and how to render these out to create one flowing movement.

The video above has been the most helpful so far. It has demonstrated how to use multiple cameras ans switch from one to the other to make a more interesting and complex animation. Sci Fi Animator demonstrates how you can simply add multiple cameras, focused on one object, and then move to different angles in order to create a more professional look. To do this, you need to place your cameras in the desired location, then go down to your time line in another screen. Click on the camera you want to start with, both in the ‘outliner’ toolbar and in the ‘properties’ toolbar under ‘render’. Then go into your timeline editor and add a marker. This tells blender what frame you want you camera to start in. Furthermore, to add another camera, you move to a different frame, and then repeat the process of clicking on the camera in all toolboxes, and adding a marker: will will end the last camera.

In my scene I have a total of 4 cameras, however using 5 different angles in total. This means I use the first camera twice, as the first scene and as the ending scene.

To add to the tutorial, Sci Fi Animator illustrates how you can add in key frames for movement as well. For my short animation which will act as part of Kontor’s promotional video, I only want to use simple movements. Therefore only using the ‘location’ key frame to move the camera about in different frames was highly appropriate as this gave a simple yet professional look. The desired look I was going for is conveyed in my ‘photo shoot’ post, where I look at existing products and illustrate themes.

Once all the cameras were set up, I places location movement key frames in the correct places to give subtle and slow movements. I further played around with the timings and key frames to process a better looking and aesthetically pleasing feel to the animation.

Once I was happy with the animation, I clicked on ‘render animation’ with all the appropriate render settings and waited to see how long the animation would tale to render.