Attached Link: http://www.mayhemproductions.org/SneakPeek.htm

Here's the first five minutes of my animated feature (LightWave).

C&C always welcome.

Message edited on: 07/04/2005 12:02

Very interesting stuff here. Character design is great. And your backgrounds are good. But your pacing is very sloooowwww. You've really got just about 90 to 120 tight seconds worth of material here stretched out to five looooong minutes. The opening shots are so hazy that they can't really be seen clearly, and they last too long with nothing going on. Also, in your panning shots, foreground elements (i.e. the tall blades of grass) don't feel "right" because they pass in front of the camera SLOWER than background elements. They should pass FASTER than anything else in the image. Also the foreground elements obscure too much of the action. I think you wanted to be arty. Instead, they seem like an obstruction. The bg plate you use for the two close-ups covering the lines "I do not understand" and "Your father the king is dead!" is the same for both shots. That's a cheat that looks like an error. You should fix it. The same for the next two shots covering the next two lines. Same bg plate. Same cheat. Same appearance of an error. Your characters are very "floaty." They stand and "float" and waver very slowly. You need to key pose them much more crisply and move them more definitively. Refer to the book "Illusion of Life" by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston for ideas on how to bring characters to life with personality. Your voice recording is tinny, metallic. You need to treat it to give it some robustness. When the old man is yelling for help in the woods, there should be some feeling of echo and distance. Also some sound effects indicating environment would help, too. Wind, birds, etc. It is a jungle after all. All in all, however, I think this is a very solid start. Sorry to be hyper-critical, but you asked for C&C and I produce animation for a living so I have a real unforgiving eye. A lot of animation stuff I see on these boards is self indulgent fooling around. But you are trying to do something truly original and telling a story. I really like that. -jjsemp

Thanks for taking your time to go through the clip. i really appreciate that and I will definitely go back and continue 'dusting up' til I get to a certain acceptable quality.