Announcing Project Heist: a High-end Cinematic Experience

"No story, maximum impact" is a production mantra that Ton pitched for the first time during the development of Sintel. As we all know, that did not work as expected: there was quite a story in the end!

While it's easy to get triggered by such a statement, there is definitely an exciting challenge in finding the balance between minimal storytelling and outstanding technical execution. Blender Studio has grown since then, and after more than a decade, it's time to try this again!

Today the Blender Studio team is excited to announce Project Heist (development title). This project is inspired by the game cinematics and realtime demos formats, and it's meant to be a high-visual-impact, action-packed 2-minutes-long animation.

A futuristic Iceland serves as the setting for the story. Images courtesy of Lydur Skulason, ThinkGeoEnergy (Flickr).

The main goals for this project are:

• Challenge Blender and the creative team to make characters and environments at an unprecedented level of realism and complexity
• Push Blender's capabilities in the interactive PBR workflow, improving and developing new tools (EEVEE, texture painting, baking, etc.)
• Develop and share production assets and pipeline with Blender Studio supporters, and with the film and games industry

The short will be directed by Hjalti Hjalmarsson with production design by Andy Goralczyk and produced by the Blender Studio team. The production timeline is approximately 7 months, with the upcoming months dedicated to visual development, R&D and working with the Blender developers to align as many technical targets as possible.

Early character research sketches.

As always, we are going share all aspects of this journey here on the Blender Studio website. You can already follow the first steps of the development at the Project Heist page.