Friendly Reaper - with blender
VFX of a reaper at Rudolfsplatz in Vienna, Austria.
I got the idea for this from 2 sources. First there is the footage that got accidentially uploaded on my channel • 11 April 2021 . This footage, which I recorded with my Samsung Tab S6 tablet, is one of many that I occasionally filmed when I walked around in the city so that I then can choose later a good one for a next project.
I found this accident to be a nice opportunity to choose exactly this footage. It seems to be a quite well filmed footage without much blurriness. What a luck. It was quite well to track.
Second, from the film Battleship I liked these alien wheel devices which were destroying everything they go through. They had a strong impression on me.
I decided to make a similar device appear in the rendering. Such a device should destroy much of the environment, but for a spare time project, it would be too much work to have objects in the footage destroyed. This is a much different task than just adding some VFX objects onto a footage. I started with some plain animations without having yet a story in mind and when it came to the cars driving in front of the camera, I suddenly got the idea of the reaper getting scared. This has several advantages. It prevents me from needing to make heavy destructions and second it is not violent (which I wouldn't like anyway because for me the main purpose of such a project is to produce realistic looking VFX on top of real footage that look nice, pretty and pleasing to the eye).
So there we are now with a reaper (as I call it) which is somewhat friendly and shy (compared to the usual intentional purpose of such a destructive device). It appears getting scared of a car driving nearby, tries not to destroy the environment and later waves friendly at the camera.
I created the reaper using the new Geometry Nodes feature in blender which was a new feature right on time back then. It came in very handy to spread the blades over the wheel and even realize some animated shaking.
I use a few free textures. Thanks to their creators.
For the sounds I took several different free sound collections about machines and trucks. Thanks for all the creators of them.
There was no need to modify them in a sound program like audacity. It is enough to put them in blender and have their pitch altered, sometimes even via animation keyframes.