Damien Valentine
is a British filmmaker who got started in 2002 with the animated "Falling into Darkness". He then followed that up with the Buffy-inspired series "Consanguinity", and is best known for his 2007 film "The Death of Jar Jar", which was used by Lucasarts for the Star Wars 30th Anniversary. His other work includes the epic four-part "Darkness Saga" and the original science fiction series, "Chronicles of Humanity", which has completed its first season. A second is already in production. He is also of the producers of the weekly podcast series, "And Now For Something Completely Machinima".
His current film project, created with Reallusion's iClone 8, is the Star Wars-inspired series, "Star Wars: Heir to the Empire" which is currently at Episode 23.
Damien Valentine Interview
How did you get interested in Reallusion and iClone specifically?
Damien: I got started with iClone when I was looking for a new platform to use for my projects. iClone 6 had just been released and I was blown away by what I saw in the preview videos. It was easy to see the potential of the software and I haven't looked back since.
Describe the machinima series you created and how long you've been working on it.
My current project is an animated adaptation of the Star Wars novel: Heir to the Empire. It started back in 2019 as a little test project. I wanted to practice animating a space battle to improve my skills in that area. What I didn't expect was the overwhelmingly positive response after I put it up on YouTube. It had never been my intention to make more than the very first chapter of the book but it was hard to ignore so many requests for more. As I write this, I'm finishing off Chapter 23 and closing in on the end of the book.
How do you use the program to create your series?
IClone is where I do most of my animation work for the series, from building the environments to animating the characters and bringing the scenes to life. In addition to that, Character Creator has been an essential tool, especially when the Headshot plugin was released, I was able to update the character models to actually look like Han, Luke, Leia and Lando. Details that were important to me to get right.
How about content? Do you buy things from the Reallusion marketplace?
The Reallusion Content Store and Marketplace have both been invaluable sources of content, particularly for character clothing. It was important to capture the visual style of Star Wars and the vast amount of content available through the Reallusion stores has certainly helped. When it comes to very specific objects (such as the spaceships), there are many communities of Star Wars fans who created 3d models for fun and share them online for their fellow fans to use in their projects. This has been invaluable in being true to the source material. The Millennium Falcon has to look like the Millennium Falcon or it just doesn't work.
Where do you see your work going in the future and will you use iClone in combination with, say Omniverse?
IClone is such a powerful tool that I can imagine using it for a long time to come. It does everything I need for my series and new features are added with every major update which just improves my workflow. The one change I made over a year ago now was to switch to NVidia Omniverse for the rendering. The raytraced rendering creates some stunning results and you can compare the original (back when iClone 7 was fairly new) first chapter of my series with one I rendered again with Omniverse earlier this year. The two programs work so well together that I plan to continue to use them both as I finish off the project.
Lastly, where can people view your work?
My work is freely available on my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/
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