I released a new short film today across YouTube, social media, and the official Sparrow Films website. The film is called BREACH: ITERATION_005, an animated short film that sees a man working in an office late at night. When he receives a notification alerting him to a system anomaly, he investigates, and, as one can expect, things don't end well for him.
BREACH is a collection of films that, by the end, will tell the complete story of a supercomputer, its world, and the world around it.
Continuing the Breach
BREACH is a story that, from the very beginning, was designed to be told across multiple parts and mediums. This film, fits somewhere within the BREACH timeline of events, but it isn't clear when or where.
The first film was entirely animated, and I wanted this one to be the same. Plus, with my limited funds and access to interesting sets/locations, and my interest in learning 3D animation, I thought it would be fun way to get further into the world.
The most difficult part of the entire process was actually figuring out the story. A lot of my films/projects are void of any dialogue or emotion (which is probably why they've all failed, now that I think about it). I had been trying to break out of that cycle for a long time, but I actually found the story worked better the more serious in tone it became. If BREACH: PART ZERO was "experimental," ITERATION_005 could be described as a suspenseful watch.
This was also an opportunity to further develop the world of BREACH in a way that the first film didn't allow for. A lot of the supercomputer is designed/inspired by Person of Interest's "Machine" or "Samaritan" systems, so much so that I included a poster and tracking reference throughout the film! More than just easter eggs, I wanted to show a world that feels different from, yet eerily similar to, our own.
Animating the Breach
Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly if you know me, the easiest part of this process was the animation and editing.
Okay, "easy" isn't quite the right word. I spent many nights thinking about shots, re-rendering sequences, and tweaking edits. But getting a character or model to move or do something wasn't as intimidating as I expected. My time in Autodesk Fusion probably helped a lot, and overall, I found Blender quite intuitive and easy to learn.
Two huge assets to me during the process were BlenderMarket and CGTrader, both of which have great plugins for finding high-quality models and textures. I also used Adobe Mixamo for animating the characters, and an unhealthy amount of YouTube tutorials for extending animations.
As a Final Cut Pro user, adjusting to Blender's definition of keyframes was a steeper learning curve than I expected, but I pulled it together in the end.
The last major hurdle was designing the ship/computer at the end of the film. Originally, it was planned to be a broken supercomputer adrift in space, but I'm not nearly talented enough (yet) to pull that off! Instead, I customized a BlenderMarket model to fit the tone of the film and tie back to something from PART ZERO. 👀
Why Breach?
To be honest, I'm not sure.
The original idea for BREACH was much simpler, and live action! I can only imagine I was feeling especially inspired (or terrified) by AI and how close it already is to Person of Interest, and I wanted to play in that world a bit before things really hit the fan.
After this film, though, I think there are more stories to tell with the BREACH world, even if they aren't about the supercomputer's creation and or its eventual takeover. And I get excited thinking of new ways to explain how everything came to be. Even if no one watches.
BREACH: ITERATION_005 is available now on YouTube and Sparrow Films.