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I wrote recently about my wishes to do a space opera. I think it's the inner child in me wants a release. I was too young to fully appreciate Star Wars, too old for the teddy-bear Ewoks in Return of the Jedi, but I was just the right age for the Empire Strikes Back.


I read a lot of sci-fi as a teen and still come back to it on a regular basis. I've always preferred the near-future sci-fi that makes you think about the social implications, rather than the blinding-with-science-but-no-plot found in many books.

So if I'm going to write something, it should follow certain rules. An article on how sci-fi works is a good place to start. And for my first Space Opera, I think I'm going to ignore most of them.

Why?

Because I'm going to keep the movie length to less than 5 minutes. At that length, I reckon that mood and atmosphere are more important that plot. Longer than that and the plot becomes way more influential.

Resources

Although a couple of years have passed now, I still like some of points in the Grand Space Opera Challenge and the tutorial's are also worthy of a mention
 
Advice

• Budget movies are possible and there are four tips for first time filmmakers

• Even the Times has an article on how to make a sci-fi hit for £4000

• Some very useful advice on the Space Battles necessary for a full-blown Space Opera.

• The Foundation3D forum has a lot of useful advice and the chance for valuable peer-review.

• For more peer-review or at least the chance to check what others are doing, the Rendorosity is the site to look at.

Open Source software

• Blender - this list has to start with Blender. It's so important and looks one of the best places to start.
• Yafray for raytracing. Blender can use Yafray for rendering.
• Digital Spaces for Multimedia presentation and demonstration. Still not sure how useful this for the purposes at hand
• Celestia is the application that started me thinking about this. I had the idea of a space journey using some modified ships.
• Stellarium is the application I came across at the same time as Celestia
• Crystal Space is a game engine. It occurs to me that if the game engine is simple but functional enough, then it may be easier to write a quick "game" and make a video of that. In much the same way as Red versus Green came about.
• Qavimator has some potential. Hope it succeeds.

Specific direction for Blender

• Read the user interface tutorial and the basic animation tutorial

• I'm finding it much easier to use the keyboard, partly because I'm on laptop without a numeric keypad.

• There are a few Blender plug-ins and scripts that I can imagine using:

1. Demolition : Can't have a Space Opera without one ship crashing into something else, usually another ship, a missile or an asteroid.
2. Explode : And when you have the spacecraft collide, you'll need an explosion
3. Terrain Maker : Could be a better movie if you can show land in it
4. Blender People : Now you can have some crowds or mass armies to put on your land
5. Blender World Forge : To generate the worlds that will bring a sense of scale to your spacecraft
6. MakeHuman : What's a Space Opera without some actors in it?
7. Walk-o-matic : to generate walking sequences for your new actors
8. Insect-Walk : to generate walking sequences for insectoid characters. Could be good for aliens, troop carriers or remote devices