- Blender Studio releases Watchtower – a tracking tool for real and animated films
- What can Watchtower do? Visual representation of your production progress
- What does it look like? Video and online demo show you how Watchtower works
- Case study “Sprite Fright”: Watchtower was originally developed for the production of the animated short film “Sprite Fright”. A really worth seeing, ten-minute scary short comedy
In nuce: Blender Studio releases Watchtower – a tracking tool for real and animated films.
What can Watchtower do? The special thing about the tool is that it shows you a visual representation of your production progress – including a timeline along which the cuts you have made are listed, or sequences that have been arranged into groups. Directly below the timeline, you can see which of the film departments was involved in the respective shot (e.g. storyboarding, rendering, compositing). To help you keep an overview, work progress is colour-coded. This way, you should always be able to see where the schedule is currently being met (or exhausted). In addition, a grid above the timeline visualises your shots or assets as thumbnails. Here too, colour coding informs you about the progress of your work.
What does it look like? If you are confused by our description of the functions, we can help. The video at the bottom shows you in sound and vision how Watchtower works. We think so: It looks child’s play (at first glance). Or you can click directly into the online demo , which uses the Blender short film “Sprite Fright” to show you how to visualise a film project with Watchtower.
Case study “Sprite Fright”: Watchtower was originally developed for the production of the animated short film “Sprite Fright”. On 28 December 2021 , we linked you to the ten-minute scary short comedy, which is really worth seeing. In the film, a group of British low-lifes – led by an eco-activist – go on a trip into nature when mushroom picking suddenly turns out to be much more fiery than the gang of five initially thought.
Click further: In the corresponding blog entry , Francesco Siddi, Chief Operating Officer at Blender Studio, provides detailed information about the Watchtower tracking tool. You can find the corresponding installation instructions, information on the licence model used and the source code of the tool on Github. We hope you enjoy letting your inner Kontrolletti off the chain.
Watchtower: Visual Production Tracker – Overview
