Snow Fall is my 3D animation fan film, based on the events in chapter "Snow Fall" in Iain M. Banks' novel "Against a Dark Background". This chapter tells a story of a young space pilot who is trapped in a badly damaged spaceship after a battle. I am attempting to recreate this story in a computer generated short film.
Here is the teaser trailer of "Snow Fall", from August 2003:
I am a fan of Iain M. Banks' work, and I wanted to create a short 3D animation movie within the sci-fi genre. Combining these two interests resulted in the idea for Snow Fall. As this is my first computer graphics animation project I did not want an overly complex scenario, yet I wanted the story and settings to also have a human element besides just space ships flying about. I also wanted to try all aspects of computer graphics, including character animation, lip syncing, etc.
The modeling (except the pilot's head, which is a Poser object imported into C4D), texturing, animation and rendering is all done using Cinema 4D software by Maxon. In the teaser I also used Cinema 4D for all the editing as well (I don't own any true video editing/post processing software, and even if I did, I'm too lazy to learn other programs when C4D can do this as well, if somewhat more awkwardly).
I also purchased AT&T Natural Speaking text-to-speech software, which I plan to use for the voices of the main characters (yes, I am trying to keep the movie purely computer generated, including the human voices!). For audio editing I use Cool Edit Pro, and for compression, video/audio muxing and other technical stuff VirtualDub.
I have no deadlines planned for my project, it will take as long as it takes. I only work on it during weekends and on my holidays. It might be ready in 2006, or so. I have now been working on the project for about a year, and I only have most of the models created and some animation clips rendered for the teaser.
My name is Patrick Aalto, and I am a programmer (or "software engineer" or something like that) by profession. I have not had any training related to creating movies, I just one day (about two years ago) decided that this is something that I would like to try. I have been searching for information and references, purchasing software etc. since then.
If you have any comments or questions about Snow Fall, feel free to send me email. To avoid spam I don't have a mailto link in here, instead I give you this hint: My email address is simply my first name at my domain name. Domain name meaning "patrickaalto.com".
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