Introduction

Alden Peters is a director, YouTuber, and Blender expert. He created a fictional universe called ‘Friends of Sophia’, focusing on relationships formed under a repressive future world, and even made a 25-minute short film set in this future.

The film was shot on greenscreen with locked-off cameras, and took him nearly 2 years to complete! This experience made him put off his plans for a feature project . . . until he discovered Jetset.

Alden Discovers Jetset

Alden tried out the free version of Jetset and created this video with Blender!

Alden and Lightcraft then worked together to create a series of short segments set in his ‘Friends of Sophia’ universe.

Episode 1

Episode 1 showed the initial meeting of the titular characters, and let Alden experiment with ambitious camera moves without having to manually track the shots:

In his second installment (featured video above), Alden uses a ‘pre-shoot’ and ‘pre-edit’ technique to visually block out all the shots of his production in his living room with Jetset, before he ever steps foot on a production stage!

We think this is an absolutely pivotal part of pre-production planning. Storyboards don’t handle time, space, and motion, and it’s hard to get a feel for how real camera blocking will ‘feel’ until you’re actually watching it.

Episode 2

Episode 2 of shows the potential of shooting the entire project on Jetset before principal photography.

Since Jetset tracks 1:1 in real world scale, the DP (in this case Alden) could load in the scene along with the greenscreen stage size, and test shoot every shot for both practical production considerations, and (most important!) how it works in the edit.

He was able iterate this multiple times in a very short period of time, as there is almost nothing to set up — shot tests happen in the living room instead of on an expensive sound stage.

The result is so clear — look at the fluid motion and blocking of the camera and the actors. It’s hard to realize that one of them wasn’t there on the set!