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effstops 83 posts
Hey guys! I'm pretty new around here, but I think this is an awesome little forum and I hope to post more often and participate in some of the challenges and stuff to improve my animation and vfx skills.
I thought I'd share my latest short film, Suburban Plight, which took me almost two years to make and features a cg creature called a Snurgle. This guy took me forever to make, mainly because I was figuring things out the whole time (I haven't had too much 3D experience).
This is what a Snurgle looks like.
And is his walkcycle.
And here's the movie:
[url=http://peerlessproductions.com/films/pages/SuburbanPlight.html]
Enter the site!
[/url]
Anyways, I'm completely open to criticism and opinions and whatnot - about the film, about the compositing, the editing, the music, the animation, everything - so post away! I'd love to hear what you think. Hope you enjoy it!
--Colin
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ar LutiK 455 posts
Colin great little movie, I love it
send it to CGtv (
http://www.cgetv.com), it's a electronic television we are putting together here at simplyCG, and exactly the kind of shorts we are looking for.
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mahmoudnahmad 1,159 posts
i love your camel/ant eater character hes so creative is this ur creation or is it a refreance by some one else
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effstops 83 posts
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ar LutiK 455 posts
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ivanisavich 4,196 posts
Hey man,
Great little film! Some wonderful camera work and the CG was also very well done (the last shot showing the creatures on the lawn as the camera trucks away following the guy steering the lawn mower looked GREAT!!!)
........but................it's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYY too long!!!! Considering that the entire thing is based around one joke (a few gags throughout...but only one main joke overall)......it could easily be cut down to about 1.5 minutes. At its current length it was very painful to watch the entire thing, even though the opening and climax were done very well.
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Hey Colin, I really enjoyed the short film, great work! Great use of your dad, i think he did a great job. The camera tracking was also spot on, great stuff. I also really liked the Snurgle creature, very cute and loveable.
My only crit would be is that if you could 'dirty' up the render's a bit, the shots of when the Snurgle up close in the camera in my opinion are too clean, if you could add some film grain or something to them? Not a lot, just a bit.
Otherwise, great stuff - hope all's goes well with the copyrights for the songs, and good luck submitting it into festivals etc.
-Iestyn
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ar LutiK 455 posts
T is right but if you compare this to Andy Wharhols hamburger movie then this ain't long at all
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effstops 83 posts
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hype 2,964 posts
hi Colin,
cool short! i have to agree with the two main comments - a little too long (although i didn't find it "painful" to sit through it all!), and the compositing could use a teeny tiny tad bit of work.
i was thrilled with the camera work, though! that big cable-cam shot in the beginning across the whole yard - how'd you do it? great camera work!
i'm sure you worked at DV resolution, right?
here would be my 3 main compositing tips:
1) use a levels filter to match the blacks of your CG to the blacks in the shot. the darkest parts of your CG shouldn't be darker than the darkest parts of the plate.
2) maybe throw a box blur or gaussian blur of 0.2 - 1.0 on the CG elements.
3) then put a noise filter set at about 6 - 8%.
there's many other little things to help, but i think those would get it 90% of the way to a perfect composite.
great tracking, by the way! i never saw the little guys drifting anywhere!
it's cool to have a Blender contributer here, as well. i'm very curious about Blender, and how it compares with the other programs. it'd be great to see you taking part in some of the challenges here!
sean
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iest_rob 1,671 posts
Some great tips in there Hype, nice one
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effstops 83 posts
Thanks so much, Hype! I'm really glad you liked it! That big shot across the yard is one of my favorite shots. There were two elements working together to make it look so smooth - first, I used a pretty basic steadicam, which made the shot a whole lot smoother than it would have been hand-held. I just walked along the grass keeping the camera as steady as possible. But it definitely wasn't perfectly smooth - there were a lot of jitters and stuff. So I ran the footage through Shake using its "SmoothCam" feature, which is totally awesome. Check out this !
And thanks for the compositing suggestions - makes a lot of sense! I did some of these things but only when I felt things looked wrong. I was eyeballing everything. One thing I recently figured out how to use is the video scopes, which I imagine can be quite helpful in compositing. The blur is a great idea! And yes, I'm shooting on DV.
I hope I have enough time with school and stuff to join in some of the challenges. And yeah, I'm a Blender fan.
It's a great little app.
Thanks again!
--Colin
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hype 2,964 posts
really nice, colin! yeah, the smoothcam really helped it. you've obviously got a really wide angle lense on your camera there, but the shot look like it was up high for some reason. did you have some kind of extender on the steadycam?
and good luck with school. i imagine you'll be out here in LA doing fx for movies in no time!
i'm not familiar with video scopes. what is it? i'm gonna guess its some kind of filter to put on CG elements to make it look like video? is it in shake?
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effstops 83 posts
Yeah, a lot of people have mentioned that it looked like a flycam shot - something shot high up. But nope! I was just walking normally. I did use a wide angle lens (an adapter) which probably amplifies the effect. Plus, there's a little hill in the yard so I do start out fairly high in relation to the mower guy, and then come down.... and I guess I'm relatively tall, so that helps a bit.
Video scopes is a tool in Final Cut Pro and other editing packages which allow you to visualize the distribution of color and luma values within a single frame. The popular histogram (like in Photoshop and stuff) is one kind of scope but there are other, more useful scopes too. They would be able to tell me exactly where the black levels line up on my CG animation in relation to the background plate.
I don't know whether After Effects or Shake have these built-in but I only learned about scopes a week or so ago, so I haven't really investigated.
--Colin
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hype 2,964 posts
oh, ok. Color Finese in After Effects is just that - i really crazy intense way to look at all the color channels, histograms, and all the other ways they have to map colors into psychadelic patterns!
it is very useful, but i must say the Color Finese interface is quite lacking. but it's powerful. yeah, looking at your black levels in there would certainly help, although even doing it by eye with a levels adjustment is would be fine.
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ivanisavich 4,196 posts
Hey man,
took me about 9 months from start to finish to complete "The Beast Within".....and let me tell ya.....it was a BEAST!
