The low-budget shorts made using Blender still pack a punch.
Sign up to Creative Bloq's daily newsletter, which brings you the latest news and inspiration from the worlds of art, design and technology. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsThe story of Backrooms is incredible.
An image posted anonymously on 4Chan backed in 2019 gave birth to an internet legend about a strange liminal space comprising a maze of empty rooms with yellowish wallpaper. Communities sprang up on Reddit dedicated to what became a folk legend, continuing long after the location of the original photo was tracked down to an abandoned furniture store in Wisconsin..
Four years later, his feature-length movie has grossed $118 million worldwide during its opening weekend – on a budget of just $10 million. Wonderfully, Kane's original series of Backrooms shorts remain on YouTube today. And watching them now after seeing the feature film, they feel even creepier and more unsettling than before. Kane's first Backrooms movie was a nine-minute short posted on YouTube as found footage.
It was simple and cost barely anything to make, yet it combines so many primitive human fears, of being alone, lost in the unknown, trapped, that it was as powerful as a big-budget horror.to learn the software and trying to rip assets from Half-Life when he began experimenting with the film. Some of the workflow he developed has survived the evolution of Backrooms to a full-blown movie.
Although the feature film uses practical sets and actors, the director still used Blender to design them. The 3D models were used to create real-world blueprints, set designs and furniture choices with art director Danny Vermette. Kane's described doing"50 wallpaper tests" to get just the right shade of yellow. The movie is a phenomenal achievement, but paradoxically it's made the original YouTube shorts feel creepier, and added to them a new meta dimension.
The cinematic version, produced by A24, delivers a polished, expansive take on Backrooms with professional lighting and sound design, and a more developed narrative structure with characters and lore. That inevitably loses some of the rawness of the YouTube original. Sign up to Creative Bloq's daily newsletter, which brings you the latest news and inspiration from the worlds of art, design and technology.
Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsors The original Backrooms feels like something stumbled on by accident; more cursed video rather than a scripted film. The brevity of the videos feels more ambiguous, and more dangerous, because of the lack of context, without the actors to anchor us. The absence of narrative makes the viewer project their own fears into the void, amplifying the unease.
And now that the Hollywood movie has become such a massive hit, these original ultra-low budget masterpieces take on a new elegiac quality. They was shot like documentary footage. Now they are documentary footage; exhibits of past iterations and experiments in the making of blockbuster movie. Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq.
He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
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