My first short film (2m 35s)

Instead of just posting the URLS and saying “LOOK!”, as was suggested by a friend, I’ve decided to type a bit more:

After three months of modeling, rigging, and texturing, and only a week of intense animating, rendering and post production, I would like to present to the Blender community my first short film: ‘An Urgent Message From J.R. “Bob” Dobbs’

The last few phases of production were hastened by a self-imposed deadline, resulting in a script that was written in under two minutes, and recorded in one take by an upstanding fellow who was on the verge of losing consciousness, but I think it turned out rather well.

Here’s a little image preview of it, though the head never appears from this angle in the film: http://i68.photobucket.com/albums/i9/dolanfitzroy/dobbs2.jpg
Made entirely in Blender, the Gimp, Audacity, and Avidemux, here it is in two sizes:

720x480 35mb Xvid AVI:
http://s9.quicksharing.com/v/1695377/Urgent_Message_Xvid_720x480.avi.html

360x240 7mb Xvid AVI:
http://s9.quicksharing.com/v/9869484/Urgent_Message_Xvid_360x240.avi.html

(these links will stay active for thirty days after the last download)

Anyone who watches this film will probably be very confused by the content. So here are the relevant wikipedia articles. (So don’t email me with questions about this “Bob” person… that is, unless you have a donation handy :D)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subgenius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Church_of_the_SubGenius

Blatant angry criticism and glorifying praise are equally welcome. This work is presented “as-is” with no license of any sort. Do what you want with it, (I’d prefer that you credit the proper pseudonyms in any derived work, but won’t say anything if you decide not to) just keep in mind that J.R. “Bob” Dobbs is a registered trademark of the Subgenius Foundation.

haha, that was a quite funny short. I only think the eyes’ animation was sometimes a bit off, as though they had an own life :slight_smile:

Bob

Excellent work. The animation was very good. The lip sync was excellent. Nice concept too.

Very nice.

  Luis

No way! Just last week I was thinking Bob would be a great animation subject.

Hilarious work.

thirty days? both are dead already :slight_smile:

.b

Yeah the links arent working.

That’s quicksharing being down. I suppose when they get their servers back on, the links should be working again too.

You really should put this up on Youtube.com… I’d love to see it.

Great work. If I had one criticism, I’d say that while the lip-syncing is excellent, the movement of the head can be a bit random. When you do stuff like this in future, try to accent the phrases better. Make the poses stronger and the timing snappier. Other than that, it’s a pretty good effort for just a weeks animating.

That yawn at the end was amazing btw. Nice job dude!

Great work! Nice concept, simple and entertaining.

I love the yawn toward the end!

Very nicely done. Very good facial expressions.

Ah! Very excellent! However, I am curious to know – do you manually edit the lip sync? An amateur question, however from one professional to a novice, I am very impressed.

You really should put this up on Youtube.com… I’d love to see it.

I uploaded it to google video just last night due to so many who were unable to view the AVIs.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7307361834454054604
I’m really not the least bit fond of flash video. The sound tends to sync horribly.

If I had one criticism, I’d say that while the lip-syncing is excellent, the movement of the head can be a bit random. When you do stuff like this in future, try to accent the phrases better.

Yeah, I really rushed myself with the animation. Next time I plan on videotaping myself acting out things like this so I can have better reference to make the facial movements more realistic.

Ah! Very excellent! However, I am curious to know – do you manually edit the lip sync?

Yep. I made an ipo control board to take care of every aspect of movement. For the lip syncing I first animated only the jaw opening and closing in tune to the words. Then I overlayed the appropriate viseme movement overtop that.

Thanks for the feedback everyone :smiley: