Short Film: "The Legend of Farmer Jenkins"

[mderidder]

I have finally finished my old student film from three years ago and I would like to share it with you all. Farmer Jenkins took a year an a half to make with the help of Mike Tonder who co-wrote, co-directed as well as created the environments and rendering. I co-wrote, co-directed as well as modeled and animated the characters. We "finished" the film visually before graduation, but the audio was poor, and we had copywritten music. I finally found a guy named Jay Semerad to clean up the audio and write and original score. So here it is in all it\'s final final form. Enjoy. (You will need Quicktime 7 to view the files which are h.264)

official site:
The Legend of Farmer Jenkins

Synopsis:
In order to get rid of his pesky brother, Ryan tells the story of a local legend named Farmer Jenkins who hunts kids to feed his fertilizer machine. In the end, the boys get more than just a scare. “The Legend of Farmer Jenkins� is a 3D animated short film about childhood legends and ghost stories and how they live in the minds of kids.

-Mark

www.mderidder.com
www.farmerjenkins.com

[VFXTalkDotCom]

look out friday the 13th, here comes Farmer Jenkins! Dude it really rocks - great work!

how long did it take you to do the original short film? what tools did you use to model and animate it?

so a few years later things have changed, hardware is faster, the tools are better and you have much more experience - if you did it over what would you do differently?

and... how do i get the rights to do the feature film?

love it!

jah

[mderidder]

Hey Jah, thanks for your complements and questions, I really appreciate them!

Jenkins took a year and a half for two guys. We started it during mid-way through our Junior year and finished it at the end of Senior year. We used Maya for everything, and Premiere for editing.

If I could do it all over again I would definately render with Mental Ray and utilize Global Illumination and Ambient Occlusion. It's hard to look at now without it, and it's kinda dark too. I also would've built better rigs and taken a pose-to-pose approach to the animation to help get better poses. And I definatley would've had a professional sound guy record the voices instead of myself with a mini-disc player and a mic at my cousins house

That was a great question.. makes me wish I could do it again, but it is definately time to move on. However, it's a lot harder to make these shorts once you get a job and out of school. We'll see...

-Mark

www.mderidder.com
www.farmerjenkins.com