Obviously, Kermit the Frog is already an international movie star in his own right. He appeared in The Muppets, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppets Most Wanted, The Muppets Take Manhattan. Basically, anything involving The Muppets.
But what if he broke out into other roles? What if Kermit had been cast in such blockbuster movies as Titanic, Twilight, The Lord of the Rings and… er.. The Shining? Well one 3D artist thought it was worth testing out how that might look using Blender, one of the best free 3D apps.
I put Kermit into over 25 Films/TVshows/Memes using Blender as my main program for the modelling, animation, and lighting. from r/blender
All in the name of education to practicing his animation and rigging skills, Isaac Barter put our favourite puppet amphibian into scenes from no fewer than 25 classic films. In fact, he even gave Kermit two rolls in Twilight as both Edward and Jacob (a werefrog?). He used Blender to model, animate and light our hero, and Nuke to composite.
He would usually bring a still frame into Nuke and paint away the main character, and then re-project, or manually 2D track the painted out parts back onto the plate to make a clean plate. The results are surprisingly impressive, as Reddit users remark. “All this while the rest of us are trying to slice the default cube with a blunt milk bottle,” one person commented.
Some were keen to know about whether Isaac used AI – he says he doesn’t. “My roto on these was VERY shoddy, whatever could be done the quickest, cuz i hate doing roto,” he said. “But I actually usually don’t use ai tools for roto, cuz. A. Something shoddy and quick is still surprisingly faster then AI half the time. B. Something high quality isn’t actually there yet with AI so I can’t use it”.
Isaac is a bit of an old hand at Kermit by now, having been responsible for many Kermit memes. He’s shared full-length clips from each movie scene on his TikTok account. He says he even started to make the entire Twilight film replacing Edward with Kermit, but I “kind of wanted to pivot a bit away from Kermit, and learn some other stuff”.
If you’re learning Blender yourself, don’t miss our roundup of the best Blender tutorials.
