IDEA. Storytelling through music.
Yastrizhemsky Ruslan aka Bigyarus, a musician from Russia, who began career as a musician in 2014, as a hobby. Now he is taking his first steps into the world of the music industry.
“Today, you don`t need to have an sound engineer’s diploma and a multi-millionaire studio to create hits for nightclubs. Everyone who has a laptop with Internet access, can become a producer, manager, musician, vocalist in one person.
But the availability of such opportunities is not an advantage, it’s only an instrument, and how you will use it depends on the final result and success in general … ” – says Ruslan.
Feeling the confidence and desire to write electronic music, he has set a goal – to write the first music album.
“… Music is business, if you release an album without any PR campaigns or the support of famous labels, then no one will notice your music.
We had to find a way to distinguish ourselves, that no one will dictate their conditions, and I was free in my work and style of music … “
So the idea of a musical album evolved into a musical project called RedLine.
RedLine – animated series, with its own universe, characters, events, and the music in it will represent the soundtrack for this series.
“… I do literally everything in this project by myself, starting from the posters and ending with the mixing of music.
And if we are talking about a full-fledged series with dialogues, without any sponsorship from outside, I can not afford to voice-over.
So, I decided that the show will be speechless, and then the music will come to my rescue. After all, music is a universal and international language, I can literally cover any person on the planet and bring to him any story with it … “
Universe. California, police chases and criminals.
RedLine events are taking place in the city of sin – Los Angeles.
A mysterious red coupe appears in the city. On the streets of Los Angeles, full of criminal structures, there are more and more frequent crimes in which the heads of gangs and influential drug dealers find themselves dead.
Corrupt police and people above do not like this, and they begin to hunt for the protagonist, but he always comes one step ahead.
“… I want to connect several different universes and styles, create an atmosphere that I like. Take a piece of the automotive theme from the Initial D, the Californian atmosphere from movie Drive, add coolest protagonist who brutally carves all this evil in Hotline Miami style – that’s my recipe … “
2017 was the start of pre-project preparation: writing the script, the characters were worked out, the project began to take shape.
“… I will not say that I am a perfect writer, but without a script, I hardly can do anything in my case. I had to write, I tried to prevent failures in story, so that the viewer could understand why the characters do what they do.
Telling the story and placing it in one music album is quite difficult, so if I get to revive part of the script that I have, I’ll think about the seasons in the future. It turns out now I’m working on the first one … “
Implementation. The world of 3D animation and the current state.
One of the biggest challenges? To achieve high-quality visual presentation of the story, using a minimal budget.
” … I’m an independent musician, I have no sponsors, no finances to hire animators and artists for the project. The only income that goes to the project now is money from my channel’s affiliate program on YouTube + freelance as a video editor to keep afloat, that’s all … “
Despite the difficult financial situation, Ruslan was able to find the tools that could give a RedLine chance to live.
“… The option of сlassic 2D animation immediately disappeared, too much to draw. The only way was to go to 3D, where I had experience, in my case it’s Cinema 4D … “
“… Everything I do, I do on a PC assembled in 2013. This of course makes it difficult to render complex 3D scenes in Cinema 4D, it’s a little bit sad … “
The first RedLine trailer was made on an old PC, which is still in use. But after that Ruslan realized that with such a pace, project could easily slow down or even stop, which forced him to look for a new solution.
“… I accidentally saw the first part of Adam – a short film from the director of Area No. 9.
Then I found out that the movie was made on the Unity engine, which can give out the CGI quality in real time without the weekly waitings of the render.
I immediately downloaded the engine, now I’m sitting studying it, there is a lot of documentation and the software is not familiar, but RedLine now definitely has a future … “
Thanks to Unity, RedLine entered the prep. level in the summer of 2018. According to Ruslan, the engine will only be used as an alternative to rendering, to compensate low power desktop PC.
“… Unity has many useful things. For example, the built-in landscape editor is ideal for filling the background in some scenes.
Scheme Cinema 4D -> Unity suits me, all the main scenes, animation, rig characters I will do in Cinema 4D, then everything is exported to Unity. Of course something will be done in the engine itself to save some time.
So these two programs will help each other. This is still the only solution until we build a more powerful machine for rendering … “
Project support.
RedLine is a large project, especially for one person.
At the moment, the work on the RedLine is going on as far as Ruslan have time for it.
In the plans to promote this project, there will be live broadcasts on YouTube that will draw attention to the project. Hopefully we could find a new audience that we can show the 3D animation workflow, and people will be able to see evolution of the project.
If you are interested in this project and are ready to support it, you can do this:
By Direct financial support
(You directly support the project):
Support via Bandcamp
(Bigyarus is an independent musician, his music is not signed on labels and it is available on the bandcamp platform, buying his music your funds go to the development of the project):
For updates you can follow on our site in the blog section, our YouTube channel, or the Ruslan twitter.