My name is Jeff Boller, and this blog is about my adventures in animated computer graphics filmmaking.
Since I was a kid, I’ve had three primary interests in life: film, music, and computers. While growing up, these three interests were like volume faders on an audio mixing console; I was always doing something that involved one or more of these things, although sometimes one interest would temporarily become much more prominent than the other two. As an adult, I took turns working in each of these fields professionally while still pursuing the other two interests whenever I could.
In a previous life — and by “previous life” I mean me up until early 2017 — I was a singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist who released three albums and two EPs under the name of The Simple Carnival. The Simple Carnival was not so much a “band” as it was a studio project where I played and sang most — or all — of the parts.
When I was working on The Simple Carnival’s final album, Smitten, I got heavily into creating animated music videos in 3D.
Through making animated music videos, I discovered the pleasure of daydreaming something, working really hard for a year (or more) to turn that daydream into a short film, sharing that film with an audience, and — to paraphrase Kermit the Frog in The Muppet Movie — making lots of people happy. I love being able to transport people with film, just like so many filmmakers have done with me when I’m in the audience.
I live in Pittsburgh, PA, which is a terrific city for computers. However, when it comes to CG animation, there’s just not the sheer number of people doing this sort of thing here as there are in, say, Los Angeles or Toronto. So while filmmaking is supposed to be a collaborative process, for the time being it’s a lot like the music recordings I did — I’m playing pretty much all of the parts out of necessity. And that’s what you’ll be seeing on this blog — me attempting to play all the parts in a CG filmmaking pipeline, and sharing what I learn along the way.
If you like reading about what goes into creating CG films on a shoestring budget, or if you simply want to gawk at someone attempting to juggle a hundred things at once, I hope you’ll find the content here entertaining and inspiring.
You can reach me via LinkedIn or e-mail me at jeff [at] sundriftproductions.com.