How to make a BobbyBroccoli video

Want to directly support me and get access to my Blender project files? Nebula is the best way to do that: nebula.tv/how-to-make-a-bobbybroccoli-video

Foolish mistake! Here comes the competition. Get ready for the channel Colin Cauliflower where I will be discussing the Nobel prizes in 1 hour and 45 minute videos!

Step 1: be the GOAT

Dear Robert broccoli. Thanks for this. I was a university drop out that eventually worked my way back and now finishing my PhD in physics. I’m going to be doing my medical physics residency in July and for the past 6 months doing applications and interviews, I documented all of it to make a really cool documentary in your style. I’m so happy you posted this tutorial to get me started!

thank you robert broccoli i'm now gonna make a 2 hour video essay on the history of banana bread

Oh, holy shit, a BobbyBroccoli video teaching me skills that I'm never going to use! I'm absolutely going to watch this at least two or three times anyway.

No way, a 15 minute video

But one question: How do you ALWAYS manage to find such poetic metaphors and endings to your videos? Like the July 4 announcement in the Superconducting Super collider or even the SS Edmund Fritzgerald for the Nortel one?

My man discusses blender, and how to learn blender, and then DOESN’T link the doughnut tutorial. How could you?! In all seriousness this was a really cool peek behind the curtain. Thanks Broccoli.

If you start to make Nebula exclusives I'm finally getting it. That's it, that's the final straw.

Already made one in Minecraft 😅 Kinda crazy how many parallels that video process has to yours

i spent all of this week teaching myself using your google earth tutorial so i could make a documentary for my ecology class assignment. i’m glad you have more to teach me.

1) Thanks for making this. It's something I wish more artists would do. It's great not just for people who want to take inspiration from your style, but also for non-artists to better understand how involved this process can be. 2) For anyone watching this that isn't familiar, Blender's keyframing system has changed slightly since the version of blender this was filmed on. You hit K instead of I to bring up the keyframing menu. I will now default to keying using whatever Keying Set you have enabled (Loc-Rot-Scale by default). 3) The Add Camera Rigs addon can help a lot with getting more specific camera control, like an orbiting camera or a dolly zoom. Blenderkit is an addon that allows you to search and bring in free assets directly in blender. I've used it extensively and it's a lifesaver.

Thank you for this! I animated two of my videos in Google Earth and my friend has been practically begging me to learn how to animate in Blender, lol

When do we get How BobbyBroccoli Makes Broccoli?

Not this video causing me to rewatch all of your long-form essays again. XD

Huh, I was wondering if you were using blender for this stuff! Glad the software is finally getting friendly enough for new users to take it up! For context, I have been doing freelance blender work for years now. It is a super powerful tool for being completely free, and near perfect for this kind of task. Really hoping more people take up something similar to your style, it is much more dynamic than the usual flat video editing associated with video essays. A couple random tips from someone who knows blender like the back of their hand at this point lol: EEVEE is your, (much faster rendering), friend. You sort of dismiss it a bit, but for the fairly flat and lighting-less shading your work typically has it is a near perfect match. EEVEE works on the same principals as a high-end game engine, just without the requirements for low latency on each frame. The main things it suffers under are transparencies (IE glass/water) and high resolution lighting/shadows. Cycles has the benefit of being a full ray tracing engine, so lighting is extremely realistic but this comes at the obvious cost of performance, especially on older GPU's without hardware support for ray tracing. This style of animation you are doing, really doesn't need much lighting at all. And just cranking up EEVEE's cube map sizes will likely fix any aliasing anyways. If you want more keyframe control, especially for how your camera motions accelerate and decelerate, look into the 'Graph Editor' window. I typically add this window right below my active camera view viewport, as the camera view is always more rectangular and there is space for a small window below it. The Graph Editor lets you mess with your keyframe's handles, allowing control over steepness, acceleration and deceleration. In this window you can also add modifiers to your keys for things like procedural noise (which makes for good camera 'shake'), bounce/rebound effects and much more. Python is another friend! I am so happy to see someone using it. Blender is built on top of python, or at least the UI is. ANYTHING you can do in the UI, you can do in the scripting tab. If a task seems mundane or repetitive, you can probably automate it! Free blender assets are literally everywhere! You mention this, but I want to reiterate for anyone else. You can find free assets in blender for near anything, or tutorials for how to built it yourself. To do this kind of animation you really don't need any sort of modeling skill or knowledge. Same goes for textures, CC0 is my personal go to for free textures but that is more suited for proper Cycles environments. The node editor is extremely powerful! You showed it for a brief moment, generating your corkboard textures. I would recommend trying learn a bit about how it works to anyone using blender. There is so much it can do and so many neat effects you can pull off with it. The node editor is the sole reason I can even texture models, as I have practically no innate 2D art skill. Most if not all of my textures are generative, because my programmer brain can understand it. Also as a final little warning for anyone wanting to get into this. Your recommendation of rendering to PNG is a good one, as if your render breaks or crashes and you are rendering to a video directly you WILL lose all of your progress. But do keep in mind that a full PNG render will take up MASSIVE amounts of space. Put it on a big hard drive, or you are going to run out of space mid render... Ask me how I know...

As someone who has also made a Boisean Google Earth video (based on your original tutorial!), and has since moved onto learning and using Blender, it's really cool to see how the workflow you've developed is similar to mine! I wanted to share another quick tip, and also ask two quick questions: - TIP! If the colors of your images don't look quite right after importing them to Blender when using Images to Planes, even when using shadeless or emission textures, check to make sure that the "View Transform" setting under Color Management (Render Properties -> Color Management) is set to "Standard." Blender seems to default to "Filmic", which caused me a ton of grief when initially trying to create color-accurate visuals. - QUESTION 1! You mentioned on Twitter that it is possible to replicate Google Earth-style camera motion in Blender - it doesn't look like that made it into this tutorial, so I'm curious how you recommend getting that kind of "steady angle, lift up, ease back down" camera movement? - QUESTION 2! When I initially tried doing data visualizations, I attempted a geo nodes setup but really struggled to get things going. Since then, I've used Python scripts for all my viz work, but the scalability seems quite poor (on my older mid-range computer, once you hit hundreds of objects, things start to chug). Do you have any recommendations for resources to help ease into geo nodes? Love the vids, cheers!

You know he is humble when he watches erindale videos and doesn't tell anyone

Thanks!