28 Weeks Later in Minecraft

After doing a few, simple Let's Play type videos in Minecraft, I wanted a larger project. I had this idea to re-create the first few minutes of the film "28 Weeks Later" within Minecraft.

I am not sure where this idea came from, I actually have never watched the film all the way through, just the intro section. I thought it would be a strange juxtaposition to see this very intense action scene played out in a blocky, cartoony world.

Planning

I first started by creating a call for help video, asking if anyone would like to participate in any way in this project. I posted in a bunch of active Minecraft forums at the time, and got a great response. I had in excess of 20 people working on the project in the end.

Pre-production

We created 3 separate "sets" for the film to be shot on the Minecraft server, which required quite a lot of effort to match up with the real film scenes. Lighting was also an issue in Minecraft because, at the time, you couldn't control it very well. We ended up using all sorts of things to get it to lit correctly.

We had custom skins created by skin artists to match the actors in the film.

We also had a custom texture pack which matched the textures shown in the film as well as adding blood splatter patterns.

We used plugins for Minecraft (a new concept at the time), for various things whilst recording, such as speeding up or slowing down the "camera man". We also used a smoothing motion plugin on the camera man to get some smooth shots when needed.

We also used green screen techniques inside the film, composing in different shots where needed. This was done in Adobe Aftereffects by one of the people who responded to my request for help video. It helped to reduce the size of the "boy" character because at the time, all Minecraft characters were the same size, there was no way to make one person smaller than the others.

Production

After 3 months of filming (only happening on Saturday's due to availability), I edited the clips in Adobe Premier Pro to exactly match the original film. We kept in the original voices and soundtrack, as replacing all of that would have been an even larger job.

Trailer

Finally, I released a trailer on my channel to get some initial momentum behind the video

Finished Product

And then on 31 Aug 2011, the final video was released

At time of writing (Jan 2025), the video has 528k views, which I still think of as a great achievement.

Behind the scenes

We later released a Behind the Scenes video, explaining the techniques we used and how the project was put together.