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Moria's Race
An adventure of a little girl ( Moria ) that is so obsessed with racing that she throws her caution out of a fast racing car's window.
Links
Moria's Race Mastodon
Teaser trailer
Final trailer
Odysee ( 1080p 4.2 GB )
PeerTube
H.264 IA From Archive.org|attachment ( 480p 160 MB )
Original File From Archive.org|attachment ( 1080p 4.2 GB )
Subtitles
Moria's Race! The movie that was hunting me for the last 3 and a half years. The movie that was trying to prove me wrong when I though ( after I'm Not Even Human ) that I'm done. And I'm not good as a filmmaker what so ever. Did it prove me wrong? Can I do a good movie? I think it's not for me to decide. Since the release of the film I have gotten a few good reviews on blenderartists.org but rather than that I've got a total silence so far. Perhaps either the movie is not good enough, or I just didn't promoted it enough.
January 2020: The Genesis of the idea
The movie has one other credit besides myself. Of course there was also the woman that helped me voice the main characters, but she was so ashamed of the accent that she has in English that she decided it would be best if she remained anonymous. So I didn't give her a credit, so to speak. I wrote "anonymous" instead.
The other credit goes to a yet another woman, who started the whole idea in my head. Who planted the project, so to speak. And her name is Mushki Zohar.
It was the early 2020 and I still used to have a mobile phone. I was working as a cashier and was trying to get a movie made about police. The script to that movie was written already. And I was calling studio after studio. Nobody had any interest what so ever.
Also around the same time YouTube ( which then was the platform where the Blender Dumbass show was hosted ) introduced another ageist policy making everything produced for kids automatically not-monetizable. I didn't care, of course, since I didn't make any money at all from YouTube. I was more interested in growing the audience, so when I have a movie project, I could say "Look I have that many subscribers", or whatever. But even that was a stretch since I reached like a thousand subscribers and that was it.
So one day I'm on the buss home from work and my phone rings. And it's Mushki Zohar. And what does she want? Well... She wants to make a YouTube channel with tons of cheap animations of princesses, for little girls. She thinks that it would be a good business move. I already know that the new YouTube policy makes it not a good business move at all. But she still wants to do some animation for kids.
And this hit me! Wait the second. I'm Not Even Human, the movie I did earlier, was violent and vulgar. And it was something of a middle finger to cutesy cartoons. But perhaps I could make a movie that would be intense and scary and would touch upon some deeper meaning that I want to explore and yet in the same time be a movie that is kosher enough so families would not cringe watching it together. And little babies would be invited to join the party, so to speak.
I was fascinated at that point with the story about the making of Dunkirk, the 2017 Christopher Nolan movie about World War II. It was rated PG-13, while everything else about this subject matter was rated R and a lot of people got upset that Christopher Nolan was afraid to show guts. But Nolan himself explained that in preparation to the filming, he watched Saving Private Ryan ( a very violent Steven Spielberg film about that war ) and saw that other people tend to close their eyes in moment of absolute horror. So they don't actually see the movie. And they miss on tension, immersion and ultimately they are not scared in the end. So to scare the audience about the war, he needed to show death and suffering without the death and the suffering being unpleasant to look at on the screen. And for that kosher approach he got the PG-13 rating.
So I though, why not extend this? Why not make a movie for kids, about kids, in a PG rating style, but that is intense and scary sometimes and awesome and amazing. I though that I can pull it off.
March 2020: Assets
On 31st of March 2020 I checked a checkbox in the software I made to organize my projects that I have finished the modeling and rigging of the hero car of the movie, the Neonspeedster.
By that point in time, I remember, the script was written right up to the point where the race starts. The race itself I didn't dare write yet, since I didn't know the layout of the racetrack yet. I have modeled the main car, probably, as a kind of procrastination. Or perhaps because I wanted to see something from the movie starting to take shape.
Anyway, I was faced with an enormous job. On I'm Not Even Human, if you saw the movie, I didn't plan much of the road almost at all. Everything there was made of straight lines connected together with roundabouts. And the turns were all 90 degrees. Here I was suddenly tasked with making a real racetrack that would look and feel interesting.
When I was a kid I used to play a game called Trackmania Nations Forever that had a level editor. I was probably playing only games with level editors at that time, because what I cared about was to make more stuff, rather than to play stuff that is already made. The editor was cell-based, meaning every part of the road, or turn or any element you can add to decorate the track were placed exactly on a grid and most of those shapes had a cell-shaped boundary. Basically imagine square parts of the road from which you make the whole track. This was the approach I took with the roads of I'm Not Even Human and that's what made the roads look so boring.
On Moria's Race I had to do something else. I had to model the track using modeling tools and improvise its layout on the go. Which requires a good level of knowledge about modeling in Blender. Cause since I don't have a concrete plan, I will make mistakes and those mistakes will need to be fixed. But I was confident that I can do it. And I did it. By June of 2020 I had the racetrack.
It would taken me less. But at that time I was locked at home during the pandemic and a strong sense of utter depression held me from working a little bit faster. But when I saw how good the Racetrack ended up looking, the depression immediately went away and I got really focused.
The city location ( where I have designed an modeled an entire town in the same improvisation way I did the racetrack ) was done only about a week later. And about a week after that the other location, The House, was also finished. That's when I started outputting car after car after car. The movie has 21 different vehicles including trucks, race cars, background cars, motorcycles and bicycles. All designed specifically for this project. Apart from maybe Dark Shadow which is very inspired by muscle cars from 70s.
A good thing is to have in a script something that is reflected in design and wise versa. A lot of future tech in movies could be swapped to current tech and it would not any difference. And it's okay. There will not necessarily be that big of a difference between the tech. And the difference that will be will be mostly aesthetic anyway. But it's good to have at least a few designs that end up changing the plot, or effecting the plot in a meaningful way. And for Moria's Race one of those designs was the truck.
I was looking at the ramps modern trucks have and thinking about how they are almost impractical for a movie about racing cars. So I designed a concept of a truck where instead of a small ramp, the whole cargo area goes down. And it gave me a few story opportunities that I otherwise didn't have. The same was with the design of the racetrack. As soon as I had it I written a few more lines of dialogue through out the film to set up one big stunt in the movie. And to tell everybody how god damn hard it is.
Originally when I started writing the first draft I wanted all of the other racers to have the same car and to look the same. Because it was a story about Moria. And not a story about the other racers. And making one car would have been simpler and faster. But I came up with one main boss, Tali, at first, and it prompted me to write more characters for the racers. And so the movie ended up having 6 individually recognizable race cars and racers, each having a different car design and a different face.
Having them be unique people made me realize that I can elevate the tension in the final race, by crashing them as if they were same-face expendable characters. But while they do have different styles and personalities ( even though only visually ), the fact that they crash makes the crashes weigh a lot more. Even if they are not dead after the crash. Because again, I wanted it to be a PG movie. I found many little psychological manipulations like these to tense up the movie without anything actually being that bad or scary anywhere on screen. For example the main concept even, of a little girl driving a very fast car, is a concept that manipulates most people to tense up very strongly even though she never crashes the car. The idea that a crash could happen. And that this crash could lead to a death of a child, that is much more powerful ( in my opinion ) than showing people kill other people on screen. And from the other side. Kids seeing kids drive fast cars, just go nuts with excitement, because its what they all dream to do. So you have a mix of insane excitement and real tension all in a kosher PG movie.
I think I can draw a parallel here with Alfred Hitchcock and the birth of the MPAA rating system. His most memorable and greatest films were made before the R rating was a thing. When every movie should have been PG. Psycho for example was famous with avoiding real violence and nudity on screen while depicting a murder with a knife of a woman taking a shower. After the R rating was established, Hitchcock could finally not censor himself, and therefor the films become not as interesting. I'm not saying that we should have censorship or anything. I even think that MPAA is stupidly restrictive. And there should not be an age based rating. But more like a severity based rating instead. But still making a kosher movie that is intense is an art in and of itself.
Voice acting
When I had finished all of the assets the obvious next question I had to deal with was the voices. I could not start animation on the movie without having voices. And I personally could only voice the male characters, which I ended up doing. The kids on the other hand should have been voiced either by real kids or by a woman that can fake a voice of child successfully enough.
At first I though about my brothers. There were getting to an age where I could teach them enough English so the could say the lines. But there was a complication. To record voices you need the one reading the lines to be in an otherwise purely silent room. And it is impossible. My dad lives separately which means that my brothers are always perpetually miss me. When I come, they explode all at once and each wants all of my attention. Which becomes very hard when you need to take one of them away in to a silent room. Where would I even find such a room? Or if I'd take him home, how could I explain why I didn't take the rest of them home too. This was emotionally complex situation, so I looked in other places.
By June 2021 ( almost a year after I had all of the assets done ) I was able to convince a girl to voice the character. I didn't just wanted her to speak the lines. I wanted her to act. To convey emotion. So I had to translate the script to her language. Sit with her for hours and hours and talk about the characters and the story. And she made a very important realization: Moria is kind of stupid. She is out of her god damn mind. And this realization made Moria suddenly louder and more intense. While in the same time a bit more complex.
She recorded with me the first scene. And until I animated it, I though that it was enough. But when I was finishing the animation on that scene, she suddenly realized that her accent in English, even though we worked on it very hard, still sounds bad. And she didn't want do it anymore. I was obviously devastated, but there was nothing to do. So I thought that maybe the movie is not gonna be made after all. And for some time I focused on different projects.
By June of the next year, 2022, I re-read the script and looked again at the animation I did for the first scene and thought that I should fight harder to make the film. I asked her again and she declined, so I asked her if she knows somebody else that can do it instead. And then eventually we arrived at an agreement that if I will not say who she is, than it is okay and she will finish the voices of the film. This was such a relieve, because if I'd had somebody else voicing the characters I'd had to redo the animation of the first scene. But since she continued the voicing, the first scene stayed exactly the as I animated it in the first place.
This time I didn't just ask for a scene of voices. I asked her to voice the whole movie. And I we didn't stop until I had everything. Because I was afraid that she might go away from the project again. But since I had everything, and she wasn't needed anymore, I could finally do animation. And finish this god damn movie.
By the way, she saw the film a bit before the release, and even though she still hates what she sounds like, she likes the movie itself.
Animation
On September 2022 I started Odysee Livestreams of the animation process of the movie. It was already 2 and a half years since the beginning of the project. I didn't use YouTube or any other proprietary software at that point. I didn't have a mobile phone. And I started understanding the copyright laws a bit better. So at that point I was kind of a different man.
The first few weeks I recorded everything I did. Then for a few months I only streamed. And then I realized that no matter how hard I stream people do not show up. When I had enough renders for a teaser trailer I decided that I will publish it both to LBRY and YouTube. And I broke my rule for this one publication. I thought maybe YouTube has a better chance of people finding you. No! The video on YouTube has less views than the one on LBRY, even though only though Odysee the views are being counted. So it's not LBRY. Perhaps I'm not interesting.
After about half a year I was animating silently by myself. Slowly going crazy as the project, even though looks amazing and feels amazing, also seems like something nobody gives a damn about.
And so here I am. Finished and ready. The thing published. And nobody shows up. It was half a week since I published the movie on LBRY and not a single view appeared. Yes, some people had downloaded the movie from a gratis lower quality link that I made. And even those people are very few. I have made a hidden art project. Or maybe I'm impatient cock and I need to give people some time. Maybe I need to communicate more thoroughly that the movie is out there. That it is available. That you can watch it now!
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