Creating a Moving Story-Reel Shot in Blender

A Moving Story Reel Shot Using Blender

I've been trying to resolve a number of toolchain and workflow problems for creating Lunatics. Obviously, completing story-reels are an early part of the production process. Normally, these are just cut-together images, but I find it's sometimes hard to get a correct feel from the timing for shots which are meant to be moving camera shots. A static shot, even with cute little arrows telling you how the camera is moving just doesn't feel enough like the actual moving shot, and this tends to make you underestimate how long the shot should be.

Of course, it should be fairly simple to composite a simple sideways-tracking and zooming (or tracking-in) shot, but I wasn't sure how to do it with Blender's Virtual Sequence Editor. I did figure out a way, though I'm still not certain this is the best approach. But it does work:

Full details of the process I used to create this shot are in my Free Software Magazine column, "Creating a moving story-reel shot with Inkscape and Blender".