VFX Breakdown and Asset: A Pretty Cool Book

Take a look. It’s in a book. Wait this book is faaake.

Lord Ravenscraft is a video essay series created by Eric Ravenscraft. You can watch the latest full episode on YouTube.

It’s a little hard to make reading a book cinematic. Not the content of the book, mind you, but literally the act of reading text on a page. I had to solve that problem for all three of my Animorphs videos, and I wanted to share what I built so anyone else who liked the solution can use it, too.

Talking about Animorphs means quoting from books a lot. I didn’t want to just do screenshots of text, because while that’s fine, it’s not super engaging. The next obvious solution would be to point a camera at the book itself, but there are two problems with that: first, it’s a bit of a hassle to set up the camera for every single page you want to quote — and that’s assuming the quote you want isn’t split across multiple pages.

The second problem is I didn’t have physical copies of all the books.

To solve both problems, I built this Blender scene of a realistic-looking book with a gentle curve, and a soft light coming from just over the reader’s shoulder.