Take one laptop and add Blender...

A still/crop from STUCK (pt. 1)

A reader submitted animated short that was produced entirely with free, open source Blender 3D and a laptop.

We receive our share of submissions and requests from readers to feature their projects on RedShark News. Sometimes, the video is so amazing or so fully realized that publishing an article on it is a no-brainer, sometimes it's a case of 'Wow, look what you can produce with this nowadays!' This short falls nicely into that latter category.

STUCK (pt. 1), directed by Bernard Egreteau, is actually the opening scene of a longer short in production. The video was made entirely on a laptop and rendered in Blender (at about three minutes per frame), which is, of course, a free and open source 3D modeling and animation application. In other words, it doesn't seem that this project had any budget to speak of, besides the pennies it took to charge the laptop. If you nitpick STUCK (pt. 1) you can probably can find areas to refine, but that's not the point. This is not Hollywood or Soho: this is a man with a laptop and a creative vision. It's an impressive showing, especially given the limited resources, and shows that you can now do at home what once took a lot of production muscle and production budget to achieve.

Here's a link and the video's below.