that was the most amazing blender animation I have ever seen. :o My only critism is that the voice that talks at the beginning is quiet in comparison to the rest of the sound, so I had to keep a hand on the volume knob on my speakers… but other than that it rocked.
…oh an one opinion thing… I thought the text was a little distracting… there is something I find appealing about simple white on black… but that is probably just me. :-?
excellent work. can’t wait to see the whole thing. 8)
I agree about the text… In the actual movie (I’ve finished most of the first half) the opening credits are done with white text on a dark background… I like that look too… For the trailer… because of the way in which I didn’t really expand upon a storyline… I used the overblown titles to hammer home a semi-logical set of events to hint at a storyline…
The audio came out a little farked because of the compression I used… it didn’t work well with all the bass noise I put in… in the original DV version… it sounds much better… and balanced…
Check this out for a complement… this is my first message on this board, and I wish to tell you that it is freakin incredible. SOOOOOO awesome… especially the robots… something about the crispness of their shadows just does it for me.
Too many lens flare effects perhaps? And ditto on the “calculated black screen alternation” on the beginning of the movie.
Pretty good overall. I’ll second the other comments made. I am still waiting to see it with sound on, but just thought I’d let you know that the alternating black screen doesn’t read at all with sound off- I still suspect its something wrong with my player.
Overall Grade :o 8) :o 8)
can’t wait to see the final!
Wow. That was amazing. I LOVED the people! They looked amazing! You can hardly tell that they were CG people. I loved the guy in the snow especially because he actually looked like he was walking in snow, how he was struggling a bit. I did find the flashing a bit distracting, perhaps you could make it a little less frequent. I loved Shige’s work too, but this, in my opinion, blew it away. Although you did have Dynamica and he didn’t…
I just waited all night to get the download (I’m on a slow modem), and the wait was well worth it. I definitely would like to see the final flick. It looks very good and well put together. I can definitely tell there was a lot of work put into it. I would be very interested in knowing what tools you used for all aspects of the film and how many people were involved. Fantastic!
Checking back in on this thread, I noticed that you’re a bit conflicted on the black inserts at the beginning. Here’s a suggestion:
Cut their fequency in half. It would still be present, but not nearly as annoying.
Accompany each one with a musical hit. Perhaps a consistent bass drum beat to signal that the blackness is important.
Also, using a technique that many movie trailers use these days (check out LOTR and, if I remember correctly, Spiderman) when you come back in from (or cut out to) the black, insert an rgb inverted frame.
BTW, what is the full length of your movie? You say you’re almost halfway done. Wow.
Harkyman: I agrre with the comments about cutting their frequency… The LoTR trailer idea was excellent… I remember when I first saw the trailer I thought it was a fantastic technique… Originally… why I did the strobing the way I did… I had seen similar strobing in some sci-fi trailers from the late 70’s. The full length will be about 45 minutes… It was originally going to be only a half hour (as the story played out much like the structure of a Twilight Zone episode)
Scanfuller: The tools used were Blender and After Effects. After Effects was mainly to do camera shake for the explosion sequence (it was easier to keyframe this way), a majority of lens flares, and final layer compositing (there were a few focal blur tricks which I did with AE simply because it was faster). As far as work and people… I did this myself, took about two weeks (one week of rendering - one week of editing and sound mixing) The models, scenes, and voices for the actual flick have been worked on for several months now tho…
Goo: Thanks for the comments, appreciate it. Valar_king had mentioned he thought the arms were a bit stiff in the snow scene… but as you pointed out - that’s the way I intended it… a man in a THICK coat, trudging through freezing cold snow, high up in the low-oxygen environment of a mountain… You’d walk stiffly too… And I must go on the record again as saying that Shige’s stuff is excellent, nothing can compare. Shige is about the most genius artist I have ever encoutnered on the net.
MexIndian: Thank you so very much, that comment made my day. I remember how long it took me to post my first comments on the blender sites. As far as the lens flares… quite a few people have told me that perhaps I use them a little too much, like a crutch… I guess this is what happens when you grow up watching Steven Spielberg’s early films over and over and over and… I love lens flares, volumetric lights, etc…
Thanks again for the comments folks. Ill keep everyone updated on this site as to what’s going on… I’m still planning to finish in August… and then I’ll find a way to post the full movie as a free download to the community (Shige deserves thanks for doing this all along with his own work)
Very, Very nice work, but I do have some criticisms - First off is the text, the font that you are using is not very good at all (IMHO) and overall detracts from the quality of the rest of the work.
Secondly, I don’t really like your intro sequence (The Starry Knight part), but that may just be a matter of personal preference,…I just feel (again) that with the quality of some of the actual movie footage you can do much better.
Right, that is all the negatives out the way, so lets get on to the positives - That explosion almost blew my socks off!!! The camera shake was incredible - So f**kin’ realistic - I stand in awe of your vision…
Were still going to have to hook up sometime and make something amazing…If you are still interested of course
m@dcow… I’d still love to do the hook-up and create magic… God knows that whatever you brought to the table would be pure artsy magic… I’m notr sure why the SKP logo bugged you… I know I can do something more 3-D… but I liked taking the original 2D artwork I’ve had for 15 years and seperating the elements… creating a 2-D with fake depth kinda logo… I thought it was cute…
Thanks for the comments tho m@dcow… you know I humbly bow to your big brain and amazing capabilities…
