Moonwalker, my first feature 3d short

[Anders Borg]

Hello all!

I have something to show you that I'm very proud of. This is a short for my final assignment. The deadline was 3 months, and I was the only one in my class that actually wanted to work alone. Overkill they said, but I pulled through! I keep coming back to this review Aaron did when I released Rayman, his closing comments were:

"It's just becoming apparent that Anders doesn't have the patience or inspiration to achieve all that he wants to -- in 3dmm, with these tools, in the community's current state, without sufficient motivation or a codirector, however you want to explain it. I hope he finds whatever it is he needs to motivate him to express himself artistically, because he has a unique artistic talent. Maybe with Rayman released, he'll be able to evaluate where he's strongest and give things another shot."

You could say that I finally found that something, and it wasn't that far away! Please enjoy my work!

[HMC]

All right, my thoughts:

First of all, I think it's downright surreal how much of the limitations and quirks of 3D Movie Maker have come through with your animation outside of the program. Everything from the way the camera pans (the way it just stops suddenly on the title, I thought the video had frozen for a second), the way the character moves and emotes, the compositional construction of the shots, the way objects are constructed, the use of black boxes as shadows, and the use of the music just scream classic 3DMM animation. Not that this is a problem, necessarily! I just think it's really interesting.

Hell, even the joke at the end, where it shows that he's under a rocket seems like a joke that would have worked BETTER in 3DMM, because the rocket doesn't have a shadow, just like it wouldn't have in 3DMM! In a real 3D render, though, it just seems jarring that the one object in the movie that SHOULD have a shadow doesn't (especially considering the movie establishes that the sun is overhead). I was actually a little confused at first, because the zoom-out that reveals that's meant to reveal how tiny he is happened to fast, that it didn't really register for me until I watched it again. I was like "Wait, was there another, bigger rocket? Huh?" before it clicked. I think a slower, more dramatic reveal would have worked better, so as to give the audience a sense of scale, because up until that point, the audience has no reason to believe that he was actually really tiny all along.

This is definitely a solid effort, though! It's got a lot of little flaws, but you're off to a great start, and I look forward to your continued output. Good work!

[Anders Borg]

That's quite an observation, I never looked at it like that! Kinda freaky. Sure I've been using animation techniques I've picked up from 3dmm, but that's actually quite close to what we've been learning at school. We've been using Richard Williams' The Animator's Survival Kit, which is a pure goldmine for animators. Though I see your point, it might be good and bad in some cases.

The other things you've mentioned are actually what I've been most concerned about. I was afraid that the shadow might've given away the whole scale thing before I intended it, so that was actually a conscious choice. But it might do more damage than good, because you know, there are always people who notice that stuff. Like the flag too, it slowly waves even though there's no wind in space. I just couldn't get it out of my mind that it looked weird when it was just static. As for the sudden camera pan stop, time was an issue. There were some problems with the rendering, it is actually supposed to slow down until it stops. I wanted to render it over again but the deadline was just minutes away, so I had no choice but to accept it. Though I will always have the opportunity to fix these things, as of now it was a matter of making the deadline.

I appreciate your feedback, thank you!

EDIT: Sorry, I didn't fully explain myself there. What I meant with using no shadow in that one scene was that if I did have a shadow there, that would mean I would have to make the light darker as he ran towards the rocket thus giving away the sense of scale too early. But now that I think about it, it probably would've been easier just to go with that and it would've been easier on the viewers. God damnit

[Bobby Swisha]

First of all, the character movements look great. So good job on that because that's like, probably the hardest part.

Other than that, I agree with HMC on everything, only thing I would add is at the end when he's burned to a crisp, the ground under him isn't, which is kind of weird.

But yeah, great first effort, for sure.

How old are you and how long have you been working with 3D stuff? What program did you use?

[Anders Borg]

Thanks and yeah I know, I was planning on adding some texture to it and re-render it but time was running out yet again. So I was hoping that with darkening the area around him would be self-explanatory.

I'm 23 and I've been studying 3D for about two years. Seeing as I'm done with school now, I'll be working a lot more with 3D in my spare time. So far my 3D work has just been school assignments. We've been using 3Ds Max but I want to step over to Maya one day, as it's more animation friendly from what I've heard.

[Anders Borg]

I'm happy to say that I got an A! Stoked.

[Bobby Swisha]

"happy to say that I got an A!"