Quite happy with the movie! It clearly shows that the technical aspects are only one part of the production - as more or less we have access to the same software. But it’s all the other bits of the production that make a professional release - story and how it is told - cameras angles, sets, scenes, etc (and the people that direct these things have been doing it for a while probably within many different technical pipelines)
What I am truly excited about is the fact that some of the features that you guys have worked on may may make it to the master version at some point. It shows where open source work flow as an ideology could be the best sum of multiple efforts, some highly professional as Tangent Animation.
Imagine how amazing this collaborative amalgation of features could become if it were to be continuously adapted by other studios with in-house developers that give back features to all of the community! Truly exciting (and thinking in the back of my mind how could a similar thing happen with architectural design)!
Yes, very nice movie. We really enjoyed it. Especially animation was really great, didn’t loose anything to anyone.
I was watching carefully the cloth animation on the girl. She had on one scene a much bigger shirt than usually. If showcase/tutorial request can be made, perhaps some tips how the cloth simulation was handled without anyone going insane. Or perhaps somebody did? I read that no robots were harmed during the film… but what about cloth simulation guy/girl?
Watched it last night, and really enjoyed the film, both as a creator and audience. It really got me excited to start up Blender and plug away at my own stuff Thank you so much for showing the world what is possible with this software we’ve all grown to love~!
Yeah, that’s totally true. The Blender studio open movies are a testament to that too. Every one that get’s made adds incredible value to the program. If this happened more often then imagine how much faster Blender development would move!
Technically, it’s a well-done movie and another showcase of what Blender has become.
I find myself sharing the earlier thoughts about the story – that the characters lack development and the bad-guy is an obstacle to fight. (Everything seems to be “an obstacle to fight.”) And, while the heroine holds herself well as she fights her way from one end of the movie to the other, in some way I feel the influence of “games.” I think that the script could have used a few more rewrites before it became final. The pacing could have been more complex.
“The bad guy(s),” in a story, are probably the most-important ones to “nail,” since they force the hero to develop, as they develop, themselves. It’s easy to wind up with “stock nasties.” (And I am not, per se, saying that you did.)
Nonetheless, you know you’re on to something good, technically speaking, when people are talking about “story,” and “characters,” and they’re taking your excellent production-values in stride. To your credit, that’s very easy to do here.
One can always debate story and artistic direction, but at least technically, to my eye, I have to say it looked amazing. The animation was great and rendering excellent.
I also watched it with my kids, a 3 and 6 year old. We had watched (tried) the first Incredibles movie just a couple of days before watching Next Gen and I have to say that Next Gen definitely draw and kept their attention much more/longer. Don’t know why, maybe all the robots made it more interesting to watch.
Anyway, great job and hope to see much more in the future.
I did manage to sit down and watch this with my daughter - we both loved it! Great job, I’ve been telling my filmmaker friends they need to check it out.
There is this really nice podcast interview with the Rigging Lead, David Hearn. Plus, he answered some of my agog questions that I have happened to ask Jeff a while back (on a separate thread).
Watched it once last week and a second time today. Here are my thoughts:
It’s still very hard to process the fact that Blender was heavily used in it because of how high the bar has been raised.
The movie is crazy good and the trailer really doesn’t do it justice. Especially the moment when Mai says “there’s way too much injustice in the world and together, we can fix it” which is put in a totally different context and telling a much less interesting character story than it is in the movie. Anyway, visually stunning, Fun to watch and with a modern story, and I’m not talking about the tech and sci-fi. Well, that too, but that’s not the point.
From the robots design (especially 7723) and human character design all the way to the animation and dialogues, the little details are brilliant. The running gag of the dog’s head getting slammed by closing doors is so silly. And that moment when Dr Rice’s sidekick drone robot says: “But Dr. Rice is dead! I have to take some time to process this… Bleep! Okay!” that was pretty funny.
A few character’s reactions in some situations disappointed me :
56:00 when Mai prepares to hit Greenwood with the baseball bat and Greenwood starts crying. To me the crying is out of place. This kind of fear should be expressed in a different way. Either by protecting herself with her arms and legs or by getting kind of paralyzed.
1:08:00: Mai gets in an argument with 7723 that doesn’t make much sense. She says “are you saying your precious robot memories are more important than my mother’s life?” but actually 7723 deleted the weapon programs way before anyone knew about the evil project and any of the s*** that was about to happen
But for me the real problem in the story is the character development hole that is the breakup scene between Mai’s parents at the very beginning. It’s very rushed and too vague for a plot device that’s going to be used all throughout the film to draw the personality of the main character. We don’t know what this breakup is all about and the dialog is super short and generic (and hard to hear), which makes Mai’s back story and her attraction to soccer hardly relatable. If I had to compare it with Riley’s interest for hockey in Inside Out, I can empathize much more with her even though I’ve never played hockey in my life. In fact I played soccer when I was younger, lol.
I really like the opening credits right after that breakup scene though, quite awesome.
The animation is generally astounding. I’m thoroughly impressed. The robots, the characters, everything. There is one moment in the movie when I got mad at the animation. It’s at 29:15 when Mai’s mom talks to her daughter after seeing her wounds. She’s moving her head a lot on every word she speaks while she’s actually speaking very softly and calmly. But really I don’t have any other complaint on the animation in any other scene, which is extremely rare for me. I’m always pissed at overly or badly used 12 principles of animation but here, no such thing in my opinion. It’s detailed, accurate and pretty smooth as we like to say.
As for the lighting, @Goranimation, you’ve done an amazing job. I don’t have much else to say.
Watched it with the kids last night. And whilst there were some flaws in some of the animation and elements of the script (nothing’s ever perfect), I don’t think they’re relevant here in this thread (for me).
So, with that said, I think you knocked it out of the park. Ozzy might have been strike one, but with this swing you hit a home run. It’s might not be up to the level of Dreamworks and Pixar but you are a much smaller studio and what you’ve done is frankly amazing.
Frankly, this is the kind of showcase that the Blender Foundation should be using to push and promote Blender. It looks amazing, it shows off a lot of Blender’s potential, and most importantly - it’s mainstream enough in it’s appeal to let everyone identify with the work. Most artists aren’t looking to be limited to art house niche projects, so Sintel and NextGen are going to grab them (us) more than Cosmos Laundromat.
I would love, love, LOVE to watch a presentation where you guys outline the good and bad points of using Blender for this project in detail. Where does it shine, where does it need to be improved, where does it need to be torn down and rebuilt. NextGen is an accomplishment that gives you an unassailable platform for providing both praise and constructive critique. I hope you use it for both
Thank you so much for showing the world what is possible with this software we’ve all grown to love~!