A cinematic, multimedia production centred around a black hole — combining 3D rendering, motion graphics, compositing, and sound design into a cohesive sci-fi short. Built entirely with Blender, DaVinci Resolve / Fusion, and ffmpeg.
Space Walk is a personal creative endeavour with high production ambition, drawing visual and tonal inspiration from films like Interstellar, Contact (1997), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Event Horizon, and Gravity.
The project runs the full production pipeline: asset creation and rendering in Blender, compositing and motion graphics in DaVinci Resolve Fusion, final edit assembly in DaVinci Resolve, and frame sequence processing via ffmpeg.
A retro sci-fi / CRT aesthetic (green phosphor terminal, Fallout-style boot sequences) runs through the interface and motion graphics elements, contrasting with the photorealistic 3D renders.
- Produce a cinematic black hole sequence — a visually accurate, film-quality render of a black hole with an animated accretion disk, gravitational lensing, and a procedural star field, composited into a short cinematic piece.
- Build a complete motion graphics package — including a retro CRT loading screen, animated boot sequence, Space Walk logo, and a Sagittarius A* stats panel — all built natively in Fusion.
- Achieve professional-grade visual effects — crash zooms, pull-focus transitions, radial blur, and defocus effects referencing the cinematography of the benchmark films above.
- Develop a broader solar system scene — using real orbital data from the Solar System OpenData API and JPL Horizons API to populate a scientifically grounded Blender scene with 32 solar system bodies.
- Create supporting tooling — lightweight utilities (such as Frame Compiler) to streamline the production workflow.
- Procedural star field world shader (dual Voronoi approach)
- Animated accretion disk with Keplerian radial speed variation, driven by a polar coordinate shader and frame-based Value node driver
- Gravitational lensing refraction object
- Solar system data pipeline (32 bodies via JPL Horizons / NASA NSSDCA)
- Retro CRT loading screen with animated boot sequence
- Space Walk logo (3D extruded style using layered Text+ nodes with Glow)
- Animated loading bar
- Green wireframe black hole animation with travelling arc effects (Fusion expressions)
- Sagittarius A* stats panel with S–F tier rating system
- Cinematic zoom-in sequence with keyframed scale animation, radial blur, and lens defocus layers
- Full edit assembly integrating rendered sequences, motion graphics, and audio
- Audio assets: boot-up SFX and terminal typing SFX
- Frame Compiler — a macOS desktop app (CustomTkinter + ffmpeg) for assembling PNG frame sequences into H.264 video clips, with progress tracking and a clean GUI
| Area | Tool |
|---|---|
| 3D & Rendering | Blender (macOS), Cycles |
| Compositing & Motion Graphics | DaVinci Resolve 20 + Fusion |
| Video Processing | ffmpeg |
| Data Sources | Solar System OpenData API, JPL Horizons API, NASA NSSDCA |
| Sound | Mixkit, Pixabay |
| Tooling | Python, CustomTkinter, imageio-ffmpeg, PyInstaller |
space-walk/
├── blender/ # Blender source file
├── raw_frames/ # PNG frame sequence outputs from Blender
│ ├── far_away/ # Frames 0001–0434
│ ├── zoom_in/ # Frames 0096–0144
│ ├── after_zoom_in/ # Frames 0482–0674
│ └── loading_screen/ # Frames 0001–0096
├── clips/ # Compiled video segments
├── Music/ # Music assets
├── SFX/ # Sound effects
├── tools/
│ └── frame_compiler/ # Frame sequence → MP4 desktop utility
│ ├── frame_compiler.py
│ ├── frame_compiler.spec
│ └── requirements.txt
├── README.md
└── LICENSE
A desktop app for compiling PNG frame sequences into .mp4 videos.
- Python 3.12 (via Homebrew):
brew install python@3.12 - Tk support:
brew install python-tk@3.12
cd tools/frame_compiler
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3.12 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install imageio imageio-ffmpeg Pillow customtkinter pyinstallercd tools/frame_compiler
source venv/bin/activate
python3 frame_compiler.py- Click Browse… to select a folder of frames — the starting frame and pattern are detected automatically
- Choose a Frame Rate
- Click Save As… to set the output file location
- Click Compile Video — progress is shown while ffmpeg encodes
- Click Open Output when done to preview the result
source venv/bin/activate
pyinstaller frame_compiler.spec
# Output: dist/Frame Compiler.appOn first launch, macOS Gatekeeper may warn about an unsigned app — right-click → Open → Open to bypass.
MIT — see LICENSE.