Zilly's War

Production Design, Visual Effects

Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Time: 2016-2019

Behind the Scenes

In 2016, myself and a group of my friends in Albuquerque began putting some 2x4s together and calling it a "set." Two and a half years later, we released a science fiction short film called "Zilly's War," a first chapter to a larger story, an experiment to see if we could make a proof-of-concept with an entirely out-of-pocket budget, our desktop computers, and a lot of trips to Home Depot.

We built sets from things we could find at our local hardware and home improvement stores, props from online 3D print services, and functional set electronics with Arduinos, Raspberry Pi controllers, and lots of off-the-shelf electronics from wholesale retailers. The result was a surprisingly little amount of on-set green screen, and a set that we hoped would make Stanley Kubrick proud.

Post-production visual effects were done primarily in Blender, with some help from Houdini, Substance Painter, and DaVinci Fusion. Rendering was done on a DiY render farm built on AWS ec2 instances. We output at 4K, and did our sound mix in 5.1. We intended to get our money's worth out of every aspect of production we could.

It was an incredible learning experience, and the thrill of watching a finished product made it all worth it, regardless of any success it might have in the future if discovered.