Really impressive on a technical level, I like all the rack focus work and the set design, lighting choices, etc. I think the voices work together well, too.

I enjoyed the writing! Makes me want to see what comes next, though I'm curious how long these take you to produce. Seems like pulling off a series on a regular basis would be challenging.

Very impressive, Forlorn! Honestly, based on the title, I didn't really know what to expect, but I came away quite pleasantly surprised by how accomplished this film is.

Technically, it's pretty marvelous. Excellent work on the animation of the creature movement, I can't imagine all that masking must have been easy to do. In particular, though, your cinematography and set design are the real highlights. The rack focusing is very impressive, but on the whole, your shot placement and lighting is pretty spot on. In particular, I loved the way you lit the mine, especially with the flickering of the torch.

The writing and voice acting came off as very natural, well done on your casting. The personalities of both Steve and Niko are very well-defined and they make for a very charming and likable duo. I am very interested to see more of the adventures they get into.

Very well done, an excellent pilot episode! Very much looking forward to the rest of this series, especially if it's as well-produced as this.

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You really weren't messing around here.  You've put a whole lot of thought into this and executed it with excellence.  The lighting, colours, sound, and animation are fantastic.

But what I like especially is how you've created such vast looking landscapes.  They really felt vast, like when you are actually in Minicraft with a large view distance on, and that's really cool.  The cave also felt really large.  You did a fantastic job of making it feel pretty big.

Although, it felt slightly weird hearing voices.  Somehow I felt like it should be silent (perhaps because Minecraft itself has no voices).  Of course, telling this exact story without voices would likely be very hard to do.

I do have a small suggestion though for the future.
Whilst most of the lighting was very good, the torch flicker in the cave didn't feel particularly fire like.  I watched your behind the scenes video and saw that you moved around a lamp for the effect.  It works, but the problem with it is that fire has a lot of dark and bright spots, but moving the lamp only really changes where the edges of he light end.
In The Meek and the Bold I saw a picture of the setup Nathan was using for his fire flicker effect and was very impressed.
I was inspired by this and made a similar setup (here's a picture of it) for Leprechauns in France and I was really happy with how it turned out.
(To animate it, I just moved the large flame piece around randomly up and down)

Perhaps you could try a similar method.  Although, if you don't want to change the hue of the light source you might use clear transparent bricks instead.

That's all just a suggestion, but overall I really liked the film!  Keep up the excellent work.

Thanks for the suggestions Squid. I'll probably pick up some LEDs soon, I would've used them if I had them - that setup looks really good.

The voices may have something to do with my usual style as well, as my videos tend to be fairly silent. But I wanted to try something different, and whilst I did consider making it silent after my first (absolutely terrible) version of the script, I decided to stick with them, especially once I got hold of some really good voice actors.

Oh yeah, and I'm already working on Part 2

Last edited by ForlornCreature (February 4, 2015 (09:20pm))