I was very pleased to see that someone had created a film longer than 5 minutes ;) And it's quite good for your first effort. The story flows well, and there are only a few spots where the action stalls (the scene where the robot is banging his head against the wall being one) For your next film, you might consider adding a bit more camera movement to liven up your otherwise static shots. I'm not talking about wild 'orbit around the whole set at 50 miles an hour' camera movement, Just have the camera zoom in like 3-4 % over the duration of a shot. It'll add that extra bit of livelyness and will keep the viewer more interested in the film. Also watch your ease-in and out for camera movements, it is bad cinematography to pan the camera (ie to follow someone walking) and then instantaneously stop the camera movement while the action continues.

It's an idea, but the results might be like the song "Who Let The Dogs Out"... where lawyers are the dogs, and the answer would be: The Lego company

Hmm how about a printer friendly entry form ie a pdf or a palin text file?...

Try using the indeo codec, it'll compress with fairly reasonable quality. harddrives can't handle layback of uncompressed frames.

You're better off devoting your time to creating your own film than working for someone else: (a) you're still unpaid but (b) you get to do exactly what you want to do and (c) you'll still end up with more experience at the end. Of course, if people REALLY want to work on other projects for free, I could use some more computers to render my movie on ;)

sounds good to me. now who has free bandwidth for my 200 meg movie?

Attached Link: http://www.asciipr0n.com/4096/rocketmen/index.html

It took me a little over a year and a half to create a 30 minute masterpiece using these little tricks that I wish I had known from the start: (1) Write a script first, and by this I mean a SHOT BY SHOT script describing exactly what you want to occur. This will save you a lot of time when doing dialog and you won't wast time re-rendering scenes over and over again (2) when you write your script, number the scenes in increments of 5 or 10, this will allow you to insert scenes into your script and still have the clips on your harddrive in a meaningful order. Use trailing zeros "scene0001" "scene0010" etc so that your files always show up in the right order in your directories (3) if you have a really important action scene, render a few 'animatics' in wireframe before you commit to a full render. (4) get adobe after effects, and render in layers with targa output of frames, using alpha channels to composite. This way you render the background once, and "actors" , that is anything that's moving, in a separate layer. Renderers dont have to spend as much time drwaing blank pixels, if you are rendering your background for each frame then you are wasting CPU time. This does not work for scenes with complicated camera movement. You can get away with panning across a larger packground plate though. (5) rendering in layers also allows you to add in extra detail by simply adding the part later and rendering it as a separate layer. Handy for re-rendering something that's screwed up without having to re-do full frames (6) animate when awake, render when asleep. Get a bunch of scenes ready to go overnight, and then set them to go while you are asleep and/or at work.

Attached Link: http://www.asciipr0n.com/4096/rocketmen/index.html

You can visit my site, and watch my short (30 mins) film done in bryce, 3d max 3 and adobe after effects...

Cool animations, especially 'dark raven'. You might want to work on the camera movement a bit though. (vs having the camera dead still for 3 seconds, then moving or tracking some object, and ending the shot with the camera perfectly still again for 3 sec.) The trick is to have smooth and continual camera movement throughout each shot. In live film, it's impossible to hold the camera perfectly still, you have to emulate this in order to make your film look more realistic. A slight pan or a slight zoom will do the trick; I always render slightly oversize and fake camera movement in After Effects... It'll make your work look a hell of a lot more professional and doesn't take that much effort once you make it a habit.

Harddrives are cheap these days, and so are cd-r's. Time to burn all your mp3's, pr0n and divx movies and clear out the 10 gigs or so that you'll need for your uncompresed frames. You might also look at one of the lossless mjpeg codecs; lossless means that you dont get compression artifacts and still get some compression.

Attached Link: http://www3.sympatico.ca/dkrupicz/rocketmen/index.html

I started out using bryce and gradually moved over to 3D max, first by modeling objects in Max and importing them into Bryce, then when my scenes started to get too complex for Bryce to handle reasonably fast I went fully into 3D max for rendering. The hardest thing you might find is the transition between the way the two programs handle materials. (But of course, MAX is the more flexible of the two. And easier to understand IMHO).

Anyways, you might also consider 2D compositing of your 3D elements, using a program such as After Effects or Mainactor. If you have a scene that is a static shot, you can render one frame of the background, and then just render the character in the foreground. Slap one layer on top of the other like a modern day Chuck Jones. It cuts down on A LOT of rendering time... to the point where you will start to be limited more by your ability to animate and edit than by CPU cycles. Not to mention that special effects are a lot ersier to do in 2D... smoke, fire, rain, etc...

anyways, check out my link above for some examples how I've used layers and such in my recent scenes...

Attached Link: http://www.coolfun.com/illusion/index.php

Try the demo of Illusion, it's a little bit more expensive but then again it can do a lot more than just explosions.

Start off with a trip to the local museum, and bring along the ol' digital camera

oops. :|

Attached Link: http://www.asciipr0n.com/4096/rocketmen/index.html

Heh, "everyone" seems to be in the middle of making a movie here. Too bad computers are still so slow: it would be great to have realtime high quality rendering from 3d max or such... Anyhow, I'm *slowly* working on my own movie with is about half done. You can check out my web page, which is being created even slower than the video ;). Usual plot: "lego" rocketmen must fight evil giant robots. Here's a few stills from early on in the film, I've been working on it about 5 months now, originally in bryce but now with 3D Max.