Creating my own Short Film - A good Idea?

Hey Patrons,

I’ve been reflecting on a few things over the past couple of days and wanted to share my thoughts with you to get your input.

If you’ve been following my work for a while, you know my interests are all over the map. Whether it’s spacecraft and planets, WWII ships and planes, Napoleonic naval battles, medieval fantasy, modern warfare, or more, I love diving into these topics and creating detailed scenes in Blender.

But here’s the thing: once I’ve created something in one theme, I often feel satisfied and excited to move on to something completely different. This has always made me wonder if my projects might feel a bit disjointed to you as an audience. One video could focus on Napoleonic ships, and the next might be a tutorial on texturing sci-fi spaceships (that one’s coming very soon, by the way!).

Another thing that has been bothering me about my work is that it consists of smaller, individual animations rather than one cohesive, bigger project. One of my biggest inspirations, Ian Hubert, is well-known for his Dynamo Dream series, which ties all his work together. On his Patreon, he shares his progress on that single world, which gives it a strong sense of focus.

That got me thinking: How can I combine all my varied interests into one overarching project?

Then, I remembered the incredible trailers for Civilization VI, which take place across multiple historical and fictional eras:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KdE0p2joJw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOT9T15mkX0

I thought, What if I created something similar? Some sort of Short film spanning multiple eras.

This would allow me to combine a lot of my interests into one project.

What exactly this would be about I don’t know. On the one hand this could depict historic events, like WW2, the moon landing, etc. On the other hand this could be about Human exploring, or human conflict.

I really like how inspiring these Civ VI trailers are. So showing battles or war, or simply too much military stuff might give this a darker spin, which I’m not sure I like.

The Civ trailers use a human protagonist to lead the narrative, but I’ve always shied away from detailed character work, since it is a lot of effort to make the look realistic and believable. It’s not my strongest skill, and I’m not really motivated to dive into it right now.

So, one options would be to do these characters in real life, and either extend the real sets with 3D or place them into the 3D scene with greenscreen. Even though I find this type of work really interesting, and I definitely want to do work like that in the future, I currently don’t have much experience with it and I also don’t have the necessary equipment like good camera, lights, greenscreen, actors etc.

A different option would be to avoid seeing characters faces and closeup characters in general. This way I would not have create super realistic and believable characters, but something much simpler might work. Similar what I did in the F35 and Eurofighter animation, where I had the pilot with his full helmet on in the foreground, out of focus.
But then I’m not sure if this would hit the same as the Civ trailers.



At this point, these are just thoughts—nothing is set in stone. Who knows if I’ll stick with the idea of creating a short film at all, but I’d love to hear your perspective.

What do you think? Does the idea of blending multiple eras into one cohesive project sound exciting to you? And how do you feel about the balance between epic battle scenes and an inspiring tone?
Besides the Civilisation trailers, is there anything like that already out there? What comes to mind?

Thanks for reading and for all your support!