# Blender, Linux, and experimental film
Blender is well known for its 3d modeling and animation, and many multimedia creators also know that it *technically* has had a video editor included in it for years.
Few have taken the video editor seriously as a non-linear editor (NLE) because while it was capable of cutting video and splicing it together, it did so using Blender's arguably confusing mixture of keyboard shortcuts and reverse mouse clicks (right is left, left is right), making it difficult for a user of any other editing system to adapt.
Some have taken it seriously, though, and over the course of several years, the video editor in Blender has developed and transformed into a serious NLE.
At a recent [Oaxaca FilmFest](
https://www.oaxacafilmfest.com/), the film
The film is a 'one-shot short', shot in the afternoon of 15 September 2018 on the set of another film we were shooting at the High Tech Campus Eindhoven Netherlands. It was totally improvised by the actor (Jan Hlobil) after being given only a basic set of instructions by the director (Rene Smaal) who also did the cinematography. The camera used was a Fujifilm X-H1, with a Voigtländer Super Wide-Heliar 15mm f/4.5 Aspherical prime lens, mounted on a tripod. The film was shot in DCI4K at 24 frames per second, and a shutter angle of 360° for maximum motion blur at the selected framerate. Sound was recorded by a Zoom H4N Pro recorder which was positioned out of view and close to the action. Ambient light was used as the only source of illumination. The film was edited by Rene Smaal using Blender's sequence editor, version 2.79. The post processing workflow consisted of adding the video source file and the recorded audio track to the timeline, syncing the externally recorded audio track to that which was recorde
d in-camera, and muting the latter. In the film, a split-screen effect was used by cutting and re-using a short sequence, making it seamlessly blend in by applying some minute keyframed exposure corrections (up to 0.3 stop). The exposure corrections were needed because during the timespan between the two sequences, the light had changed subtly. Finally, in Blender the white balancing and color grading were done — only minor adjustments were needed. Closing credits were created using The Gimp, in the form of three high-res PNG stills which were then imported in the Blender timeline and animated using keyframes. In Blender, the following plugins were used: Kinoraw Tools, VSE Quick Functions, EasyFX, and Cycles Render Engine. The render time of the film was 25 minutes and 41 seconds on a Mac Pro 8-Core with 22GB RAM running Linux. The length of the film was 1,296 frames.
