Beautifully animated. I loved the bit where the gun was spun into the air. The blood explosions were very pretty, too.

The animation is better in the second one but the original is closer to the film's actual scene.

Great animation, really smooth.
One of the bests LEGO Fight Scenes I've ever seen. Good job!

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Keshen, 2 questions.

1. How long does it take you to make such brickfilms?
2. How much time do you have on your hand?

Summary:

Overall, I appreciated the style of this one much more than your previous films mainly because your animation was much more fluid. There were a lot of good ideas here, from camera movement to effects - things that were lost on me in other films by you because of bad quality, sub-par sets, and jerky animation, so I'm glad that you've improved in those areas. The blood still doesn't seem the best to me, particularly since you mixed it with more realistic blood in the last shot, but I think it still worked.

What you can do to make your next film your best yet:

You definitely have a lot of skill. Working on polishing your technique more. There were some shots that I felt needed more impact. Bring the editing to a higher level, and work with the visual look of the film. Also, establish the conflict a bit. This is obviously closer to a test than a full story, but if we know the character, we'll care about what happens to him in the fight. Look to bring that element into future films.

- Leo

1. This one took me four days, and when I say four days I mean four intense days of working non stop between uni and my other commitments. The reason why I crammed this particular film is because I managed to squeeze it into a written assignment for uni which requies a practical component along with the theory side.

2. Not as much as people seem to assume, I'm just a lot quicker at animating than most I guess. For the record though, I have two hands...

To VN: Yeah, the gun was chroma keyed in.

Yes, of course LBJ.

You have a strange attitude towards "brickfilming". You seem to judge everything almost robotically and rate everything by it's technical qualities and caliber of the set design etc. I'm interested to know what your opinion of South Park is.

Admittedly this was very rushed, and I'm still pretty new to animating, but I think it turned out to be what I was aiming it to be, which is: just a bit of fun. There isn't supposed to be a story, it's basically a test video which incorporates the simple good guy versus bad guys motif, and in that context, in this particular case, the story of the character isn't more relevant than following him run through the corridor. It's mindless violence, that would be the point if there was one.

Like I said though, it's strange how you rate lego animations. My favourite lego animation of all time is Meatspace Episode 2: Leggo my Pokemans, look at the sets and animation in that.

Very nicely done, Keshen. My personal favorite moment was when the hero tackled the helmeted guy and brought him down to the ground. That scene in particular had excellent camerawork and animation, the physics of the movement was very realistic.

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Hmm. That is a hard post to reply to. From what I see, you made two points. First, you claim that I only judge brickfilms by technical quality, and second you defend your film by saying that it's just supposed to be a fun video - it's not meant to have a large supporting story or context.

This is going to be a long and possibly tiresome post to read, so my apologies to you in advance. Hopefully you'll find it worthwhile. Many things go into making a film into a great film. To simplify, you generally need the basic technical stuff - a good story, good camera work, and something else. That something else is hard to define - it's what makes a film fun to watch. Some people would call it cleverness, creativity, or even genius. Whatever it is, it's not something that I can teach someone. Some films don't have amazing technical qualities, but they have something in them that makes them fun to watch. To be honest, some film-makers here have it, and some don't. I watch new film-makers, and it's sometimes easy to tell. Some brickfilmers just don't have it. Their films end up coming out as a string of events that we don't really care about. Others like you, for example, have it. Something about your films - even short tests like this - are really fun to watch. They're unique and interesting.

Since I can't teach that "something" to anyone, all I can do is comment on the film and try to offer technical suggestions as a filmmaker. Your past films showed that you have that spark, but I felt like their technical aspects were poor enough that it took away from the enjoyment. What I was trying to say in my comment is that this film had some really good technical stuff, so your film-making genius (I'll call it that) really showed through. The camera work - instead of being just interesting - was really beautiful. The animation - instead of just being unique - was realistic and cool to watch.

All that being said, the last statement of my post was not to judge this film but to say that if you can make a test this enjoyable, I'd love to see a longer film from you. You definitely have that genius - I'd love to see you put it into a more developed story.

Thanks for taking the time to read that behemoth of a post. You are so right that technical quality isn't everything. But at the same time, all I can teach or help with is technical quality. Making the film enjoyable is something that's impossible to explain in a post.

- Leo 

Last edited by Leonardo812 (February 17, 2009 (03:21pm))

Make sure it has awesome fight scenes. The shot where the guy grabs the helmet man and throws him on the flow made me go SHAMWOW!