I KNOW this must have taken a lot of time and hard work to make, but it (along with your other videos) feels very rushed and amateur. The thing is, I have a hard time pinpointing exactly what it is. The script and voice acting is a part of it, but I’m putting that aside because I know it’s hard to come by good voice actors, and it really is’t the main problem. Even the pacing feels weird, the way the clips are tied together doesn’t always work, and I would have had almost no way to know at the beginning that that was a memory. The music also feels really awkward and cuts off. While the character models could be better, I feel like the textures are more to blame. These characters are in DIRE need for better texture work, and some SSS wouldn’t hurt (I don’t know how that would affect the render times, but I think you should try and get them looking good first, then adjust things for render time). But upon thinking about it a little more, it couldn’t JUST be the textures, because even scales looks bad, which can only be because of the lighting. In a lot of scenes it’s just completely blown out, with 100% black on one side, and near 100% white on the other this looks really unrealistic.
But great job, I hope I didn’t put you down, I just want to give you some advice for improvement. You have something that a lot of other people don’t; work ethic. It is a ton of work you’re putting into these, and I hope you keep working, but in the end quality outweighs quantity and hard work. I challenge you to 1. make your renders look better, and 2. work on your storytelling (camerawork, lighting, etc…). At this point, I actually would say that making films without voice acting would have been the best choice (to focus on visual storytelling), and you likely don’t want to change now, but don’t let your past projects keep you from improving, after all “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” - Henry David Thorough.
happy blendering!
