Sparky

Sparky is a short film created by 3D animation enthusiasts. Sparky follows the story of a robot named Sparky who seeks a new power source for the failing city of Glenton during a widespread energy crisis. Sparky, confused about the world around him, begins constructing a new energy source, unknowing of the laws and consequences put in place.

This short film holds a special place in my heart as it was a great learning opportunity and gave me lots of networking instances which allowed me to meet some fantastic and talented people.

I originally joined Blender Open Animated Project (BOAP) through a writing competition held by the @blender.community Instagram account. The account had posted an open invitation to join a community based film project, with a simple filtering process. I had near to no modelling experience at the time but was curious to see what open positions they had in the hopes of finding a role that might fit with my skillset, and ended up signing up to join the writers team. The task was simple: write a short story about time travel. This really excited me as I’ve always loved to write, especially fiction.

I ended up writing a story regarding a crusader knight that killed a time traveler, thinking he was a wizard, and using his time machine to travel through time, witnessing historical events unfold, both good and bad, ultimately witnessing atrocities unfold during the world wars yet to come. When he reached the end of time he reflected upon the militaristic life he had led up to that point and concluded it was pointless, he decided thereon to be a lumberjack, a childhood dream of his.

This story landed me a position in the writers team of BOAP. I was ecstatic to say the least. We worked together on a project called ‘Proxima’ a short space adventure that inevitably fizzled to nothing due to a lack of structure within the different teams. It is understandably hard to form a functioning hierarchy within an unpaid community project. After the fall of Proxima, BOAP made some internal structural reformations, which resulted in a complete restart with the vision of the project.

A member from the modelling team, Christopher Hosken, rose from the rubble of Proxima and presented an original script for a new project: Sparky. The team was delighted, and with a clear vision and structure, production began. I had previously joined as a modeler with no 3D experience, making it difficult to contribute to the new project as a script had now been developed, but was allowed to stick around by the director (Grant Chapman) because of my “legacy” status within the team. From there I attended the weekly meetings listening to the updates and suggested ideas where I could. Where I shined the most was with my organizational attitude. Before BOAP I had been president of a youth leadership club by the name of Interact Club Posadas, where I learnt both organizational and leadership techniques, my success within the club allowed me to be promoted externally to a Sub-delegate status within the district, representing the 5 clubs within my province. These skills would pay off greatly as I would be able to contribute motivation and organizational abilities to my team members that aided greatly with the teams productivity. This effort was recognized a few meetings in by my team members and I was put forward to the director as a candidate for a producer role within the team as the role remained vacant up to that moment. To my surprise the director agreed with the promotion and I took on the responsibility with excitement and nerves, from that moment onward I took an administrative role within the team, creating spreadsheets and organizing meetings between team members, team leaders and the directive board.

Sparky ended up taking 13 months to produce, presenting highs and lows, excitement and burnout. Being an international project held completely online by a team of strangers I consider this project to be an absolute success and something I’ll look back on fondly from years to come. I still keep in regular contact with both Grant and Christopher since the end of BOAP and consider them both friends.

Lessons learned:

• Keep the workflow momentum going.
• Strong leadership can pull a team through the hardest of moments.
• Structure, organization, spreadsheets and deadlines might be annoying for the team, but without them projects fall apart.
• The production pipeline for an animated project is extremely intricate and complex.
• There are no wrong questions and there’s nothing wrong with asking for clarification.
• Skills are definitely interdisciplinary.