Star Wars: Rebel Commando

[Duck]

Hi all! 

I present my largest work to date - using several different voice actors, CGI and Stop-motion, it's been a massive project but I hope you enjoy it!

 

C&C welcome :)

 

[Cody Startale]

That was very well done! I really enjoyed it. First, the overall plot – I very much like that it is "old school" Star Wars, so to say. I mean that it's not all Jedi and lightsabers and force usage and stuff, but instead it's just a bunch of Rebels fighting the evil Empire with commandos and space battles, and that's how I like my Star Wars best.

The physical animation, the stop motion parts I mean, are extremely well executed and very impressive. The digital mouth and body animations are an extremely clever idea, though they could be executed better. For example, you have a lot of shots that are actually still images and only have your characters move digitally. I those cases, it would probably be a good idea to photoshop in a clean version of the head with removed facial features, and then animate the faces on top of that. This way, you can avoid numerous animation flaws that are currently produced by your technique, like smeared eyes when characters are blinking or parts of the facial features seem to overlay and cover moving parts and stuff. Also, in a few instances (just a few, don't worry), I think the digital movement was actually too much. Mouths, eyes, jars, it all worked very well and brought your characters to life a lot. Shoulders and stuff might be a bit too much and would have benefitted from actual stop motion, I guess. But overall, I think you found a very good balance and combined everything very well.

Technically speaking, I think the quality could be improved to outright excellent levels if you used a more sophisticated lighting setup. As of now, your animation is slightly brought down by the fact that the movie has an overall yellowish tint that reminds me of a desk lamp and most shots have visible noise due to being a little too dark for your photography settings. If you can fix those things, your image quality will be a lot better and make your work outright beautiful to look at.

The space battles need to be more fast-paced. This gets easier when you have more digital compositing experience, but as of now, some scenes are a little slow, especially when blaster fire is involved which seems to be travelling at the speed of a Bantha. I do understand that you probably didn't have a lot of animation frames to work with, but in that case, it's all the more important to have the space battles be quick and fast-paced. If your spaceship is just one still image, better show it flying by and getting blown up for three seconds instead of ten, if you know what I mean?

 

Now, I hope my criticism doesn't come off as pretentious or annoying, because it's really just meant to help. I am very impressed by your efforts and think that if you combined your obvious hard work with a little more excellency here and there, you will achieve something that's outright fantastic! Also, I am a visual artist, so I really dig all kinds of digital effects efforts and offer my opinion in order to help others improve whenever I see the promise of great work like here. If you need any help in the digital animation and vfx department for your next project, I would feel honored to be of assistance if I can! So to sum it all up, I think you did amirably and you should carry on, because I can't wait to see what you will come up with next time. Oh, and one last thing, I also enjoyed the voice acting. I think for non-professional speakers, it was very high quality. My favorite was the lad who starts speaking around the 01:00 mark. He actually reminded me of Ezra Bridger in the Rebels cartoon, I think he could do a neat impression of him.

[Duck]

Well, first off, thank you so much for the detailed feedback! I am taking it as a compliment as in the past I've only had short comments, so I must have taken the animation to the next level to receive detailed feedback explaining how to take it up another notch! 

Apologies to any onlookers for the incoming quotefest! :P

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That was very well done! I really enjoyed it. First, the overall plot – I very much like that it is "old school" Star Wars, so to say. I mean that it's not all Jedi and lightsabers and force usage and stuff, but instead it's just a bunch of Rebels fighting the evil Empire with commandos and space battles, and that's how I like my Star Wars best.

Thanks! We're both on the same page there! I've always been more interested in the nitty-gritty battles that surely would make up the bulk of the conflict rather than the force side of things - there's also more room for movement in possible storylines using brand-new characters that are regular troops than official characters who have a known backstory!

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The digital mouth and body animations are an extremely clever idea, though they could be executed better. For example, you have a lot of shots that are actually still images and only have your characters move digitally. I those cases, it would probably be a good idea to photoshop in a clean version of the head with removed facial features, and then animate the faces on top of that. This way, you can avoid numerous animation flaws that are currently produced by your technique, like smeared eyes when characters are blinking or parts of the facial features seem to overlay and cover moving parts and stuff.

Thanks for the feedback on this. I've been using an actual lip-syncing software, which manipulates a still image. This is my first foray into this technique (aside from a short musical brickflick involving singing animals a couple of months back), so it still has some work to go. If I can get it right, I hope it's something that can make my videos a bit more unique with the blend used. In future videos, I'll probably make the body movements more subtle on reflection, although personally I do like the fact that the shoulders and chest move slightly, as in my own vision it makes the characters feel more alive - similar to how figures in official LEGO games and productions are slightly bendy. I do take on board that it isnt a perfect technique however and will look at ways to build on it. I know that photoshop is another option, but I dont want to write off this technique just yet! 

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Technically speaking, I think the quality could be improved to outright excellent levels if you used a more sophisticated lighting setup. As of now, your animation isslightly brought down by the fact that the movie has an overall yellowish tint that reminds me of a desk lamp and most shots have visible noise due to being a little too dark for your photography settings. If you can fix those things, your image quality will be a lot better and make your work outright beautiful to look at.

Thanks for explaining how to achieve excellence, that gives me confidence I'm heading in the right direction! Sadly I am a bit restricted financially currently when it comes to my camera - which is a HD webcam, but thankfully has manual controls! I'll take a look into simple but improved lighting techniques for future videos though in light of your comment! (No pun intended!)

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The space battles need to be more fast-paced. This gets easier when you have more digital compositing experience, but as of now, some scenes are a little slow, especially when blaster fire is involved which seems to be travelling at the speed of a Bantha.  I do understand that you probably didn't have a lot of animation frames to work with, but in that case, it's all the more important to have the space battles be quick and fast-paced. If your spaceship is just one still image, better show it flying by and getting blown up for three seconds instead of ten, if you know what I mean?

I received a similar comment on the youtube comments by an experienced animator, and so I take this on board from you both! I'll admit those scenes were my first attempt at digital animating (which was made slightly easier by my experience with stop-motion) and looking back the pace is a bit slow! I understand entirely what you mean and so next time I'll speed it up!

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Now, I hope my criticism doesn't come off as pretentious or annoying, because it's really just meant to help. I am very impressed by your efforts and think that if you combined your obvious hard work with a little more excellency here and there, you will achieve something that's outright fantastic! Also, I am a visual artist, so I really dig all kinds of digital effects efforts and offer my opinion in order to help others improve whenever I see the promise of great work like here.

As I said at the start, I understand completely where you're coming from, and feel that the more detailed feedback I've received already is from people who genuinely want to help me improve further. 

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If you need any help in the digital animation and vfx department for your next project, I would feel honored to be of assistance if I can! So to sum it all up, I think you did amirably and you should carry on, because I can't wait to see what you will come up with next time. Oh, and one last thing, I also enjoyed the voice acting. I think for non-professional speakers, it was very high quality. My favorite was the lad who starts speaking around the 01:00 mark. He actually reminded me of Ezra Bridger in the Rebels cartoon, I think he could do a neat impression of him.

Thanks for the offer of help! Maybe we can collaborate on something at some point!

Glad you enjoyed the voice acting. This was the first time I've outsourced the voice acting rather than just putting on a variety of silly accents myself, which I felt worked really well due to the natural variety of voices! I'd also like to thank David Cole who did the soundtrack from scratch, SFX and music - it was a bit of a monster for him, but I think he did really well to build tension in then right places!

Again, thanks for taking the time to feedback to me! I really appreciate it and hope to use your advice to improve further!