mrbeckham09's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Potion Shop]

Very nice animations and story telling using strictly *grunts*. It is important that the story had a beginning, middle, and end. Each character also carried a distinct persona. Good creation!

[The Reward]

The creativity used within this project is insane. Very nice job. The story line and personas goes without saying.

[The Reward: Tales of Alethrion - "The First Hero"]

The animation is very clean and the character's personalities are well written. Very nice portrayal of a hero gone dirty.

[#CHANGETHEBEES]

Classic feel to it. Hilarous and good life morals.

[Mega Battle Assassin]

*Straight faced* the whole time.

[Clint Love the Kids!]

That turned out extremely badass. Poofing into the cloud of dust and imitating running caught my attention. The end also made me laugh.

[Do You Bleed?]

That humour.. was completely uncalled for.

[Mortal Kombat Kock-ups]

Very nice production. The characters' movements match those of the original characters during the character selection screen. Did you custom make the character animations during the fight scene or did you pull from other video games? If the first case, very well done. So realistic. The fact that you mimic'd the mortal combat game by adding in custom photos and characters is wicked. Good job mate.

RicPendragon responds:

I used existing sprites. I had to make and modify some of my own (like Shovel Knight digging and Johnny walking slumped over etc. but always worked with existing stuff).
I actually kept altering and editing to make sure things like movements were the right speed. For Johnny Cage's walk, I spent 10 minutes just making sure the feet were on the right potions. I can be a little perfectionist.

[Inaction]

The scene looks extraordinarily realistic. Is that due to the effect of filming with a camera and adding CGI to the scene? In other words, is the key factor of realism due to using a camera for filming?

BungalowBelf responds:

Thanks for the question, it's a great one.

This is entirely CGI, I was trying to fool you into thinking it was real though, at least to start with! And yes, cameras absolutely add to realism. A real camera is never perfectly still, even when it's mounted it has very slight movement. Almost imperceptible, that is, until it absolutely stops, and then you'd notice. So if you're going for realism, everything in CGI should be always in motion, but not so much that it's possible to tell that it's always in motion! It's a difficult line to tread. So, I did my cameras in two ways.

Firstly, the first shot is tracked from live action footage I shot. I had modelled the bookcase in my living room and put the digital characters onto it in CGI, and replicated the living room lighting. Then in real life, I put two objects roughly the size I figured the inaction figures were (I don't actually have them, and I've never seem them in real life), added tracking markers, then filmed the approach with my iPhone. Then I tracked that motion using the tracking markers and applied it to a camera in Maya. Although I could have used the iPhone footage as a background plate, I thought it would be easier just to create it in CGI, especially given the resolution constraints I was working with in the trial version of V-Ray. If I was to do this in HD I'd probably use the live-action plates, and mask out the tracking markers.

The other cameras were partially animated in an iPhone app called Cameraman for Maya. It's a good app that's still in development, and while it's still missing a lot of the functionality I'd like to see, it does allow easy creation of simple camera motion. However, I needed to do a lot of hand-editing of the keys.

I hope that's useful, and answers your question.

[Kojima Leaves Konami]

Very nice retro graphics. Clear voice acting and informative storyline. Well done

JumpNJetz responds:

Thankyou so much! :D
-Jetz