Short film - Road to Buzludzha

[Pims]

Hi!

My name is Vincent Filhine-Trésarrieu and I am a senior 3d designer freelancing from London.

I have just finished a personal project called "Road to Buzludzha" I'd like to share here:

I discovered the Buzludzha monument years ago, and I've always wanted to tell a story about it.
This building, located on top of a peak in the Central Balkan Mountains in Bulgaria, used to be the head quarters of the Communist Party and is now slowly decaying since the collapse of the USSR in 1991.
I had the opportunity to visit the building twice and I enjoyed the experience so much that I decided to produce a short film about it.

I wanted to try and convey the feelings I had when slowly getting up there.
All the assets where modelled and textured by myself (building, sculptures, landscape, car, trees and grass...), using a variety of software such as 3ds Max, Speedtree, Terragen 4, Blender and Nuke... and obviously Corona :)

I also composed the music; I wanted this film to be 100% homemade.

I hope you'll enjoy it!

[TomG]

Just to check, all of this is 3D, and none of it is stock footage, real world footage with compositing, etc.? (As you can tell, I can't tell, which is always a good thing :) )

[Pims]

The only bit which is not 3d is the character (well it actually is 3d for the exterior car shots). For the interior car shot and all the walking/seating ones, I have done it in Blender Grease Pencil by filming myself doing stuff, integrating it on planes in preview renders from the various shots and re drawing the frames at 12 fps.

The main models (building, sculptures, car, terrain...) are done in 3ds Max, all the vegetation created and animated in Speedtree, and the clouds rendered in Terragen 4. No stock models (I used Debris Maker for some of the gravel/twigs, and tyflow to break some of the paving).

All of that composited in Nuke, edited in Premiere, et voilà :)

[TomG]

Well, in that case, let me just say - woah! For the moving vegetation (bushes, trees etc) and even some of the building, or the roads the car was driving down, I was not sure whether those were taken with a camera or not.

BTW I love the Grease Pencil character, that really adds to the animation, far better than a regular 3D model. Maybe it also helps the rest of it look "even more real" in comparison! Nice work all round.

[Pims]

Thanks for the kind words!

Character wise, I work mainly in the archviz industry, so I am familiar working with Anima, or use simple mocap files to populate the shots. But the results are usually quite generic, and difficult to make believable.

I wanted something more bespoke here, and as I am not a great character animator, this solution seemed to be the one that would give me the best results to convey both a sense of scale and a way to read the path to get to the building, as well as a different than usual look.

Happy you like it :)

[Pims]

Here are some stills extracted from the film.

[1equals2]

Bulgarian here.... Respect for the awesome work,  ton amount of work and the unique  style!
I really enjoyed this one on many levels - the attention to details, the effort put into landscape, the guy - all looks pretty well  together!
Respect also about  composing the music as well !

[Pims]

Thanks, and happy you enjoyed it!

[Jadefox]

Spectacular Pims
Watched it a couple of times over, so good.

[jms.lwly]

Bravo, super good on all levels - art direction, camera movement, foliage, need I go on? Exceptional.

[Свет]

Awsome, Congrats! And thank you for visualizing part of our history!
Аlso not so far from Buzldzha is one of the most important historic places for the Bulgarians, where is the Shipka monument of liberty, I hope you visited it too!

[Pims]

Thanks guys!

I didn't visit the Shipka Monument, but I'll make sure to go when attending the next Total Chaos, hopefully next year :)

[arqrenderz]

The moment you put the character raised my hype so much! Great work on all !

[marchik]

awesome work) I really liked everything except for the shot with the 2106 approaching at 0:17, I think it would not hurt to add dust and gravel flying out from under the tires and the sound of riding on asphalt crumbs and maybe the brake pads creak when braking
(simply because they always creak on this car and for my brain it would be +100500 to realism) and of course all this can be added at the stage of compositing, from all the other frames I just thrilled. Bravo!

[Pims]

Happy you enjoyed it, and thanks for the feedback!