For the 3D animation „Titanic’s Victims – Echoes from the Sea Floor“ I imagined a remote-controlled submarine with a spotlight transmitting noisy video & spooky sounds from the ancient sunken passenger ship.

Download the original video file for better (noise) quality!

This is my first Blender project, so I had to learn a few things, e.g. how to make a camera follow a path or how to control the lighting. The Blender infographic map smoothed the way for me – thank you very much!

Title & credits was created with the image editing program GIMP and the graphics knot & seahorse form openclipart.org. I took the 3D models (gramophone, shoes, cello, rocking horse & bell) from archive3d.net.

The choral Näher, mein Gott, zu Dir is in the public domain, the free sound effects are from YouTube’s Audio Library. Audio editing & mixing was done with Audacity – like Blender & GIMP a free software!

# Add Gaussian noise to the images
for i in *.png; do convert +noise Gaussian $i $i; done
# Merge images to video (16000k with Gaussian noise)
avconv -framerate 24 -i %04d.png -b 5000k video.mp4
# Combine video and audio to one file
avconv -i video.mp4 -i audio.m4a -c copy video+audio.mp4

PS: YouTube offers a page with recommended upload encoding settings (container: MP4, audio codec: AAC-LC and video codec: H.264). It also suggests appropriate frame rate, bitrate, resolution and aspect ratio.

PPS: The course instructors curate 3D animations in this playlist.