What I did:

Blocking animation typically means dropping cubes and planes into a scene to establish rough positioning and timing before committing to detailed work. But I’m a visual person, and I needed to get the images out of my head. So while I haven’t started animating yet, I’ve been building the environments properly as I go – setting up cameras, testing compositions, thinking about cinematography. Once the scenes are prepped, I’ll block the animation, then go back and tweak environments if needed.

Each scene uses existing models for scale reference – John’s height, the front door dimensions, the car sizes. This keeps everything proportional as I build outwards.

House exterior:

To save time, I purchased a British house model from TurboSquid, using the front door from my hallway scene as a size reference, the house was a different scale to my door. I had to remodel the entrance to accommodate the door used in my hallway scene, then I adjusted materials to match my parents’ style of house. The geometry was a bit of a nightmare, meaning I had to do a lot of work on the roof section of the garage to get the tiles to look right.

TurboSquid model:

Door appended for scale:

Remodelling the entrance door and window:

Door in position:

Outside, I used the procedural road generator tool I built for a previous PCG module to create a road, added a driveway, grass, hedges, and topiary pots either side of the front door – not narratively significant, just what my folks would have had. An HDR image provides the landscape beyond the house perimeter without needing to model further.

HDR image added:

The Rover P6 sits on the driveway. I’ve positioned a rigged little girl model (BlenderKit) ready to watch John attach the IAM badge to the front grille – she’ll be holding a teddy bear (also BlenderKit). This scene will establish John at the height of his driving confidence, sharing that achievement with his daughter.

The garage:

I remodelled the garage doors to have a single roller door rather than the double doors on the original model. My parents had a roller door, and I’ve set two states – open and closed – for different scenes throughout the film.

Inside the garage, I’ve populated it with shelving and tools from BlenderKit. The Peugeot 2008 model sits inside. One critical prop is a timber beam on the floor – this has been a feature in every garage my dad has had, across different houses. He positioned it so that when his tyres touched it, he knew he was far enough in to close the door behind the car without being so far in he’d hit anything at the back of the garage. There was hell to pay if it ever got moved!

When my parents first bought the Peugeot 2008 – an automatic – my dad was confused due to his dementia. He thought he hadn’t reached the timber, so he kept revving. The car mounted the beam, it shot backwards, and the car lunged forward into the shelving along the back wall. Items came crashing down onto the bonnet of the brand new car, causing thousands of pounds of damage.

I’ve made the door mirrors reflective so we can see John’s facial expression as he revs the car, while also seeing the tension of the wheel on the timber.

Paper props:

All the paper elements are done. The parcel containing the IAM badge and certificate has a branded IAM label and period-accurate stamps – 66 pence, which was the cost of posting a parcel up to 1 kilo in the 1970s according to The Great Britain Philatelic Society records. The parcel was originally a BlenderKit model, but I separated the lid, modified the geometry, and edited the materials in Photoshop. I’ve set up a constraint on the lid rotation so it hinges open as John opens it.

The DVLA envelope and renewal letter were created in InDesign using a simplified format with a hand-drawn Helvetica-style font. These are everyday objects that carry significant narrative weight.

Daughter’s living room:

This scene shows time passing – an animated clock moves from around 1pm to 4pm, with the sun shifting across the window to show the hours John’s daughter has been waiting for him to arrive. The view through the window shows the road I used to live on, with a small modelled garden wall and lawn.

Most assets came from BlenderKit. I added a canvas print on the wall next to the clock showing me and my partner – generated using Microsoft Copilot in the same style as the family photo – adding more family context to the scene.

I’ve downloaded a character model from Fab to represent me in soft focus, looking out of the window. It’s actually a boy model, but the hair is similar to mine and we’ll only see the rear, avoiding the need to animate facial expressions if I can help it. I’ve tested depth of field in a few renders to ensure the focus stays on the clock and the window while the daughter figure will remain present but not sharp.

Right after the phone call to say John will be there in 10 minutes:

Three hours later, John finally arrives:

This will be the confused expression:

I also sourced a character from Sketchfab to represent my mum for the car driving/roundabout scene later. This was originally a dancing model, so I’ve stripped the animations and modified it significantly.

What I learned:

Scale reference is everything. Starting each new scene by appending an existing model – John, the front door, a car – immediately establishes correct proportions and prevents future scaling issues, which will help to keep lighting consistent across scenes.

The shift from “I’ll block with cubes” to “I need to build this properly” reflects how I actually work. I needed to see the environments, test the cameras, understand the lighting. Blocking will be faster now because the spaces are real and the compositions are tested.

Having done a lot of sourcing of assets previously, the scenes came together relatively quickly. A big chunk of time was eaten up by sorting the house model, particularly the garage roof which had been bodged! The road tool is an incredibly fast way to generate a street scene. The small, specific props – the parcel hinge, the DVLA letter formatting, the period-accurate postage – were a little fiddly, but those details ground the story in reality.

Next:

Still to build: the nursing home interior and the road scenes for the roundabout incident. Not sure which I’ll tackle first, probably the nursing home since it’s another key emotional beat. Then I can start actual animation blocking, moving John through these spaces with placeholder movements to establish timing for Martin’s musical composition work.