Name: The Honey Thief
Director: Kyle Piorkowski
Genre: Animation, Short film, Family
Duration: 2 min 55 s

The film

In fields where every colour of honey is a musical note, the smallest bee must choose between driving the thief off and letting him in. Nobody speaks: the voices are music.

RUNS2:55 MADEBlender 5.2, an original score Streams in 4K (3840 x 2160), 24 fps, stereo.

The story in eight acts

The crystal hives at the festival, rings of coloured light rising over them

0:00 THE FESTIVAL

At nightfall the bees light their seven hives, one note each, and the whole field sings and dances. Far off on a windmill, a crow who cannot sing watches. Nobody hears his caw.

The crow at the hive's golden tap, a ring of blue light over the comb

0:51 THE THIEF

At dusk the crow flies down to her hive. They meet and dance; then he drinks the sapphire honey, the one her hive needs to sing.

Night falls and the hives light one after another, a pink ring around the next

1:17 THE RULE

Night falls and each hive lights the next with its note. The chain stops at her empty hive.

The crow drinks the glowing blue drop from the tap while the small bee flies at him

1:27 SHE TRIES

He is still at the tap. She tries to stop him, alone and then with the whole hive. He flies off with the last drop.

1:42 THE WINDMILL

At his windmill she catches up with him. She understands what he wanted all along: a voice.

The bee offers the sapphire drop to the crow, face to face

1:57 THE GIFT

She gives him the drop. They fly home together, and he gives it back to her comb.

All seven crystal hives lit in the night meadow

2:15 THE EIGHTH NOTE

The chain runs to her hive, and he sings with his own voice: the eighth note. Everything ignites.

The small bee hovers above a golden rail at the next dusk, smiling

2:26 NEXT DUSK

The next dusk he sings for the hives, and she greets him. This time he is part of the music.

A thief who wants a voice, and the bee he robs

The crow

He wants to sing and can only caw. Stolen honey gives him one borrowed note that cracks. He ends as the one who gives a note back, and is given his own.

The smallest bee

She wants her hive lit before night. She tries three times to drive him off, then sees that he needs the same thing she does, and lets him in.

Seven honeys, seven notes

Tap a honey to hear its note, tuned to A4 = 432 Hz.

Every hive holds one colour of honey, and every colour is one note of E minor. A full comb lights its hive, and the hive sings its note: colour, light and sound are one thing.

The hives light in a chain at nightfall. If one is empty, the chain stops there. A scale only comes home on the eighth note, E again. No hive holds it. In this story it belongs to the crow.

The row of hives at dusk, rings of light spreading through the grass — **The crystal hives**Crystal and honey lit from inside, like stained glass.

The crow alone on the windmill under the moon — **The windmill**Where the crow lives, alone with the moon.

The arrow of bees streams toward the crow at the tap — **The tap and the comb**

How it was made

TWO MAKERS, ONE STUDIO

Dream Resin Studios is Kyle Piorkowski and Caro Ruhland, two co-creators who happen to be in love. We inspire each other to imagine bigger, and we review each other's work the way we hope everyone will: playfully, kindly and honestly.

The Honey Thief grew out of that back-and-forth. One of us dreams something up, the other takes it further, and every scene, colour and note went between us until it made us both smile. It is a story about a crow who wants a voice and a bee who chooses kindness, and it is really about the thing we love doing most: making something better, together.

And yes, we are a little obsessed. Kyle once lived on a bee farm in New Mexico, and he has been buzzing with ideas about bees ever since. We love honey, everything it is and everything it gives, and we think the world deserves a little more of it. Consider this film our sweetest bee-ginning.

PICTURE

Blender 5.2 (EEVEE) for every shot of the film: the scenes, the bee's and the crow's rigs, the lighting and the rendering. No game footage is in the film.

MUSIC AND VOICES

Our own music engine writes the score as data and synthesizes it at A4 = 432 Hz, with no sample library. It also sings the bee's small hummed voice. The crow's caws are shaped from two public-domain field recordings.

DESIGN

ChatGPT drew the first concept sheets of the characters. Meshy made the crow's first base mesh from that sheet, which our tools then rebuilt: feathers, wings, beak, eyes, jewellery and his own skeleton.

PIPELINE

Our own Python pipeline made the bar map, the cut, the mix and the master, with ffmpeg for the edit. AI agents (Claude) wrote and ran it under our direction. Every story, look and sound decision is ours.

THIS PAGE

The crow and the bee above are the film's own models, exported from the rigs every shot of the film uses, each with a short idle loop. The comb, the honey and the motes are built in code with Three.js, drawn with WebGPU where the browser offers it and WebGL 2 where it does not. No third-party model.

BORN IN TARTARIA

The Honey Thief is set in the world of Tartaria, the much bigger project we are building: immersive art for VR and desktop, where sound, colour and play become one experience. In Tartaria the hives sing, light answers music, and every interaction is made for flow, the kind of synesthesia where you hear a colour and see a note.

This film is one small door into it. The seven honeys, their notes and the crystal hives you just met all come from that world.

Behind the scenes: The Honey Fields (1:24). The crystal bee hives built in Blender and in the game itself, with their own score. Every shot says which is which.

Explore Tartaria

Made by Dream Resin Studios

Kyle Piorkowski · Caro Ruhland

Two co-creators, one studio. The story, the world, the characters, the animation, the music and the sound are all ours.

The Honey Thief is our first short. With development support, we want to grow Dream Resin Studios into a home for many more worlds like this one, made together.

Write to us Pitch deck (PDF)

Contact: liquidlightproject@gmail.com