The Vacuum Salesman

I made a short film that had been floating around in my head for a long time. Work slowed down a bit for the Coronavirus and I carved out some time to make a fun short film. A friend named Allen Laster once warned us in a tweet: "Don't become a door-to-door vacuum salesman" - and I've wanted to animate a scene leading to that ever since.

I modeled the characters in Cinema4D and fed them through Mixamo to morph some animations together. That was an easy way to get a weighted skeleton, I then could re-keyframe the movements or add modifiers to get what I wanted. I created the scenes, lighting, cameras, and textures in Cinema4D. I supplemented them with a couple models from the Happy Model Toolbox. After rendering the scenes out in Cycles4D. I compositied and edited all the footage in After Effects. I punched up the visuals with Red Giants Magic Bullet Looks and added sounds with my voice and some sound effects of MotionSound.io and VideoCopilot I believe. I originally wanted to go for a claymation-like material, but it just didn't look right, the choppyness and textures were more distracting from the narrative.

I really like how the dream sequence turned out with all the match cuts in the movement of the son and camera. I just created the movements in advance and added them to each scene, changing C4D constraint tags and colors. I think the effect works really well. I was a fun quick little project. I hope for many more to come. :) Cheers.

#shortfilm #Cycles4D #Cinema4D #characteranimation #doortodoor #salesman #vacuum #suck #dreamjobs #fatherandson #AfterEffects #Mixamo #RedGiant

Some Early Tests!

Trying lots of different thumbprint and subsurface materials,

Many different tests of how far the volume builder can go before breaking too.

Some Inspirations: