Longtime Star Wars fan Howie Day released his fan film opening scene rendered in 4K quality, and it's quickly going viral.The video, which Day shared on Twitter, follows a pair of Imperial shuttles deployed from a fleet of destroyers to search for the Rebellion. It has already reached 49.9K views, only two days after being uploaded. Day explained that the sequence was created in the 3D graphics software 3ds Max at 4K bitrate, and then rendered using the VRay Optix GPU renderer.[EMBED_TWITTER]https://twitter.com/howieeday/status/1605449920919441408[/EMBED_TWITTER]Day is the Tech Art Director for Echtra Games, founded by the co-creator of Diablo, Max Schaefer. The San Francisco-based game studio was started in 2016, and most recently released Torchlight III, an action role-playing game, in 2020. Day has been with the studio for the past year and is an avid fan of sci-fi nostalgia.
From Social Media to Household Names
Many filmmakers and other artists can attribute their early successes to online popularity. Dan Trachtenberg, director of 10 Cloverfield Lane and more recently the latest installment in the Predator franchise, Prey, gained attention with his suspenseful short, “More Than You Can Chew” which quickly reached 300K views after its release in 2011. The short follows two paramedics who get more than they expected when responding to a distress call. Trachtenberg followed that short up with a fan film entitled "Portal: No Escape" based on the popular Portal game series by Valve. That online short has amassed 27 million views to date.
Music Composer Zack Hemsey, best known for his song, "Mind Heist" featured in the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s Inception in 2010, is another artist whose work found its way into movies and television via online popularity. His song "Vengeance" was used for the finale of the film The Equalizer with Denzel Washington, as well as a teaser for season 2 of Game of Thrones.
Colin Trevorrow also credits his early career to a YouTube short film he released entitled "Home Base," which chronicles the story of a bitter ex-boyfriend who exacts revenge by pursuing a sexual relationship with his former girlfriend's mother. That online short reached 225K views, and Trevorrow went on to direct the award-winning comedy Safety Not Guaranteed, before moving on to rebooting the Jurassic Park franchise with Jurassic World.
Source: Twitter