It's a terribly clichéd story, believe me - more than thirty years of life are behind you, a sedentary job suddenly starts magnifying your belly without a previous warnings, you get short of breath when walking up the stairs (two or three floors will do the job), the wounds heal more and more slowly and you begin to fall asleep watching your favorite TV series (this part especially breaks my heart). Suddenly you realize that you only have about half of your (hopefully vital) life ahead of you, and you start to question a lot of things that you have been doing without major problems until now. Perhaps the job in which you spend a significant part of your life abruptly begins to make less and less sense to you, even if the salary may not be that bad.
All at once I remembered that I am actually a highly creative being, who used to always invent, write or draw... and actually hasn't been doing it for some time, and my long-term job in the IT industry doesn't really compensate for it. And above all, I'm completely crazy about movies... after all, I also studied film school (theory and history, not practice) and I didn't make any use of it at all. And the time has come to change it, have some fun and change the current paradigm of life. Films combine many artistic disciplines, from storytelling, to design, music, photography, etc. and I adored all of it. I used to make movies in my head as a kid, so I should make movies 4real!
Being an introvert by nature, I decided to start with an animated film, where I can get everything myself without much compromise. I remembered 3D Studio Max, which I installed on my Pentium about twenty years ago, I didn't know anything about it, the computer was crashing all the time, so after less than an hour I uninstalled it again and the whole idea of creating 3D went to the trash. After twenty years, however, an existential crisis came and it was time to dust off and reevaluate the original idea. It didn't take long for me to come across the open source software called Blender, which was completely free... well, don't try that, duh.
I installed it and was as confused as ever. Fortunately, there was YouTube and a lot of enthusiasts who created their own tutorials. Of course I started with the now legendary donut tutorial by Andrew Price a.k.a. Blender Guru. More tutorials followed, every time I needed to solve something new in the program, some YouTube geek lent me a helping hand with an instructional video. It's been more than two years and I'm now uploading my own short videos to my Youtube Channel...and I know this is just the beginning of something that will make me even happier in my life.
So... I'm slowly approaching forty, I've always wanted to make films, I'm just getting started, but it's already making me happy and one day I'll definitely make a full length film at home... and you can too!
Below you can take a look at some of my short films (like very short for now, more ideas than coherent stories, but over time everything will become more and more epic, you'll see😉).