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What even is SFM?

Source Film Maker or SFM is an animation program made by Valve. Although its not the most used animation software today it holds a has a large place in the heart of indie and online animation. For many people SFM was their first real chance at trying 3D animation before blender was as accessible as it is today. The software is completely free and opposed to many other software was also rather inviting as valve allowed the usage of a lot of settings and characters from their hit game Team Fortress 2.

It was also made very special by valve due to the fact that they initially were very supportive of the animators. For many years Valve hosted the Saxxy awards where anyone could enter with their animations to get the chance of winning a Saxxy, a special and highly limited melee weapon, in game.

The SFM community was and is a pillar of online animation and a lot of people still use it to this day with great effect online. A lot of the animations feature tf2 characters, voice lines, and models but many other import character models to make animations about other franchises or even original projects.

In this series of articles I’ll be focusing on some of my favorite SFM animators over the years and some of their projects.

Who is Tipsy Duck?

Tipsy Duck is an SFM animator who have mostly made absurdist dark comedy shorts. A lot of SFM animators focus on humor. Even well produced animation usually have a focus on some rather silly jokes which can have been made through sentence mixing. Tipsy Duck differs in the fact that he mainly focus on harsher subjects and poetic stories. Some of these focus on the banality of life. His shorts often take form of mock infomercials. It is definitely not for everyone but its special.

Before he started making SFM animation, Tipsy Duck made machinima videos. To the uninitiated, machinima was a way to make stories in games before other animation tools were readily available. You would take videos in game and dub over them to create different stories. Some bigger examples of this was Red vs Blue which laid the groundwork for Rooster Teeth who later made more ambitious project like RWBY and Camp Camp before they went bankrupt. Tipsy never got as much accolades for his machinima videos but we see from the start the more cinematic angle he takes as a story teller.

I’d like to take this opportunity to talk about some of my favorite shorts of his:

How to ride a bike is a short themed after old timey VHS infomercials. It follows Timmy who has to learn how to ride a bike. The short tells a story about life from the lens of an American in the mid 1900s. a fictional world where being a communist or drug addict was the worst possible thing to imagine. It follows Timmy’s transition from the wide eyed Timmy to the determined Jimmy and at last to the father that is Billy where he then continues the (bi)cycle with his son.

The Brain follows Bobby, a kid trying to learn about brains. When he goes out to buy his mother cigarettes he walks into a man who studies brains and he gets to enter a mans mind. The short is to me probably the best of Tipsy Ducks dry humor at work. The thing with Tipsy Ducks comedy is that it’s sort of hit or miss. Either you like it or you don’t. I wouldn’t recommend most of his stuff if you don’t enjoy his comedic styling cause a lot of it is rather similar in tone to the rest.

After many years of making SFM animations, he also decided to learn blender which he has used in a few of his later videos. Most of his stories are rather grim and the social commentary don’t always work for me. I don’t really like his latest video for example OtherSkin, it feels like it’s intentions are somewhat muddled. It’s a short about wearing others skins to feel better. It has some good jokes, I do however grow a little weary. It focuses due to its premise on race and gender in ways that can be discomforting or offensive and its not one I would recommend personally.

It’s also sort of sad to say but his jump from blender to SFM doesn’t read as a clear improvement in this short. There is something to be said about it having a more uncanny style then his SFM animations but I have a hard time praising it as an artistic choice when it feels more like a limitation.

There is however one short of his I find extremely wholesome and I’d hugely recommend to anybody.

In Binary love from a zero to the one we follow a small computer who has been love struck by a refrigerator. The computer sits and types random texts all day. Jamming his prongs on a keyboard in an attempt to write a love letter that can finally explain his feelings for the fridge.

Through the video we see him do everything in his power to be something worthy of the refrigerators love. After he is done writing the perfect poem he looks at the fridge as if he is thinking that it impossibly could be good enough for her. He then deletes it, dooming him to sit another eternity trying to find a text good enough for him to show her so that nothing will be left unsaid.

It’s a tragic, cute, and heart tugging tale that is a big detour from the rest of Tipsy Ducks catalogue.

If you are interested in 3D animation consider reading this article about the new indie 3d anime: The Bloody Mary