The 27th Cavern, Animated Minecraft Series!

Hello again guys!
I’ve started a new minecraft series.
Let me know what you think?

Episode 2 is complete!

Episode 3 is up!

I really liked it :slight_smile:

Nice smooth and professional animation!
Nice voice acting and the story was very good too.

At first I thought I wouldn’t waste my time on this but then I watched 1 episode and I had to watch more lol :slight_smile:

Thanks for the feedback, I hope you enjoy more videos to come.

Brilliant mate. Particularly the engaging story

Good looking, you might want to experiment a bit with the camera movement, try to use small movements in boring scenes, like when they are sitting at the table. You can do a lot by using different camera angles, not just a close-up of their faces.

Good ideas. I’ll give that a shot in the Next Episodes.

Episode 4 is up!

Episode 5 for anyone who cares.

This is great! THe voice acting could use a little work, and you might wanna get a better mike, but I love the animaton and the story is great!

Episode 6 is live! Thoughts?

Episode 7 is done! Leave me some comments and tell me what you thought!

Episode 8 is finished!

Episode 9 is finally done, let me know your thoughts!

I really like it! I will be following you for sure. :wink:
You succeeded where most people fail. It is engaging. It constantly pulls at your curiosity and keeps you intrigued.
How much critique do you want? Do you have anything in particular that you would like comments on?

Anything and everything, go ahead.

Okay. :slight_smile: This is a mixture of criticisms, complements, and neutral comments. I had to divide this into multiple section because it was too long.

STORY/WRITING:
PLOT:
As I said, the story is compelling. The amount of mystery is great. You reveal enough to be exciting while withholding enough to be gripping. Your opening narrative in episode 1 got the viewer up to speed.

CHARACTERS:
The viewers are not inclined to care much about the characters or their world. For thrillers, this can be a good thing. And, getting viewers to care takes time. So, I think you did fair with this. You chose a protagonist, and you quickly identified him as a good guy worth caring about. You quickly identified the bad-guys as being bad.

You could have more intimately shared what the main characters’ dreams, frustrations, and ambitions were to help the viewers care more. But, that would have slowed down the story and taken more time. You did do some of this, so it’s really a balance of trade-offs. I didn’t notice any scenes that were counterproductive to the characters’ development.

POINT OF VIEW:
You handle perspective well. You consistently use third person limited. You expose some information outside of Andy’s perspective, but not too much. And, you switch to Andy’s fiends’ perspective when appropriate. The transitions in perspective are clear and smooth.

DIRECTING:

CAMERA:
The camera work is decent. You avoid having the camera completely still. That is very good, especially for something high-energy like a thriller. Some subtle shaking of the camera gives a crude and intense feeling that helps pull the viewer into the scenes. But, I feel like most of the movement is just for the sake of moving. The camera could often be moved in a way that pulls the viewer into the scene more.

I will reference some times in episode 9. At 0:25, you pan right while the enforcement officer talks. That adds nothing to the scene. But, moving toward or away from the officer would communicate something to the audience. If you moved in, it would feel more menacing. If you move away, it would feel more like you are slipping away and more vulnerable to the officer. You could even have made it like it was a 1st person shot of Andy losing consciousness. It could communicate Andy’s struggle to stay conscious and his vulnerability at the same time.

At 1:11, the scene is high-energy and fast-paced. The camera movement does not add to any of these qualities. Imagine this. Have the camera roughly level with the doorknob and moving toward the closed door. You could even decrease the focal length at the same time (needing to move closer more quickly) to make the viewers feel more intense and constricted. Then, you throw the camera backwards with a camera shake when the door is kicked in (adjusting the focal length as needed). I would keep the camera zoomed in and jerk the camera around looking at the different enforcers. That would keep the camera moving fast and make the viewer feel constricted.

3:14 is a great example of camera movement. It really adds to the feel of the scene. It feels sneaky and secretive. It enforces the idea that you are witnessing a sinister conversation. The composition is also good in this shot.

COMPOSITION:
I noticed some shots that have good composition, but I’m not sure how planned they were. Most of the shots appear to be purely functional. The shots are kept simple, which is good. The frame isn’t flooded with things going on. But, you could probably relax the face shots and show more action during dialog delivery. The majority of shots are face shots during dialog delivery. You could show more. Strictly showing the face can be boring. Sitting/standing and talking is the most basic and least interesting form of dialog delivery. If you only show the faces, all your dialog might as well be between actors who are sitting/standing and talking.

For instance, at 3:38, you could put the camera beside the passenger’s head so that you can see the driver moving the steering wheel and, maybe, leaning in toward the windshield to get a better look in the fog. This would show the passenger’s facial profile except when he turns to talk to the driver. And, a light in the driver’s side window would give a nice silhouette of the driver. You don’t want every shot to be over-stylized; many shots do need to be functional. But, you do want to have good visual flow and shapes in as many of your shots as possible. This is largely dependent upon your poses as well.

GRAPHICS:
MODELS:
The environment has a great Minecraft look to it. And, the characters mostly look like Minecraft characters. The placement of the eyes is odd, though. The forehead is smaller than normal (the eyes are high). In order to balance this, the features on the lower part of the face, like the chin, need to be larger. This can easily be done by moving the mouth up. (Buzz Lightyear is a good example.) Also, the eyes are further apart than normal (relative to human’s). Since the corners of the mouth should roughly extend to the centers of the eyes, your mouth should be wider. Here is an example of these two proportion tweaks where only the mouth is modified. It might not be the best character design, but it is an improvement to aesthetics.
stc=1

The characters have several polygon issues. First, the polygons at the sides of the mouths have artifacts when the mouths close. This seems like it is from extremely uneven deformation. Quads are probably being deformed to look like triangles. It could also be from self-intersection. This seems to be a typical problem for Minecraft animation assets. Even great animations like

by Blue Monkey have similar issues (although to a lesser extent). THIS is an example of decent (too many edge loops) topology that alleviates the problem. The topology would need tweaked for a square mouth, though.

The second polygon issue is the joints at the elbows and knees. The joints have triangular shading. Part of this is because you haven’t locked two of the rotation axes. That allows the vertices to be deformed asymmetrically by the armature. Moreover, it looks like the joints don’t have any corrective shape keys.

is a Youtube tutorial on making a Minecraft arm/leg using corrective shape keys for a very clean and crisp joint. This, along with the mouth’s polygon issues, are not significant. But, they are distracting.

ANIMATION:
The overall animation is okay, but i feel that three main improvements could be made. First, the lip sync is a bit excessive. The lips don’t need to move that much when talking, especially at the end of a sentence. It’s just distracting, how quickly and frequently the mouth moves. Moreover, the top teeth move a lot. The top teeth are supposed to be fixed to the skull. I have seen many animated characters break this rule, but those characters usually don’t move their jaws much. Since you move the jaws a lot, you may consider fixing the top teeth. It would feel more natural. The smoothing of the mouth movements should result in smoother jaw movements as well.

Since your characters’ mouths are so low on their heads, I wouldn’t fix the top teeth without modifying the facial proportions as mentioned above. Opening the mouth upwards helps compensate for the mouths being so low. So, this is more for your information rather than saying that you should change it.
On the topic of lipsync, I like how you deform the enforcers’ heads to show that they are talking. It’s effective, and you deform them just the correct amount. It is noticeable but not so noticeable that it is distracting or odd looking.

Second, the keyframe interpolation looks fairly raw. It looks like you mostly just set keyframes with automatic B�zier interpolation (Blender’s default interpolation mode). The animation will look better if you modify the interpolation curves more. If you didn’t know, this stage of animation is called “polish”, and it takes a lot of time. So, I can’t really suggest that you start doing it in your animations. But, it really helps. This stage may also include cleaning up motion by smoothing motion paths and cleaning up your keyframes (usually replacing many keyframes with a single tweaked curve). A large focus of this stage is making the animation look aesthetically pleasing. But, it requires good poses to work with if you don’t want to spend this stage reanimating.

Luckily, due to your style of Minecraft-like movements, the motion is rather rigid and simple. So, the polish wouldn’t need to focus much on smooth, broad motions (like arms swinging at someone’s side while he/she walks). That should make the polish stage much faster. Moreover, using Minecraft-like movements reduces the amount of physics involved in the motion. However, every movement is still influenced by physics. And, a large portion of polishing is spent faking the subtle physics. Your movement seems to lack physics altogether, and adding some subtle physics to your animation would help considerably.

is a video where someone attempts to incorporate physics into an animation. But, the final result looks like garbage despite the keyframes looking okay. The reason why the result looks so bad is because the person knows nothing about physics and how/why the object moves.

video introduces the basics of physics, and its animations mostly look great. Unfortunately, physics gets complicated very quickly. And, you must be very creative to apply it to animation since no course on physics will make that correlation for you. Animators practice a long time to build an intuition for motion and physics that fundamental physics courses teach thoroughly. I tried to find something like “physics for animators” to link to, but I didn’t find anything.

Third, your poses seem weak. Everyone is nearly always just standing or sitting. This goes hand in hand with shot composition. I understand that you’re going for a Minecraft style, and that is good. But, some appealing visuals are good, too. You don’t want to overdo it, but some body acting and good silhouettes would be great.

SOUND:

Your sound is decent. The mixing is good. The voice acting is decent, especially for a low-budget short. The sound efforts are good. They build the scene without being messy or obnoxious. You use the music well.

I had some comments on the lipsyncing that I felt fit here better than in the animation section. Sound does not travel as quickly as light. Sound travels roughly 30-40 ft per frame in a 30fps animation. Therefore, it is good to delay the audio the appropriate amount of time if the character or action is in the distance. If the viewer is in a character’s face there is no delay. But, the mouth should never delay the audio. The mouth should stop moving when a character is finished speaking. In your dialog, it looks odd how the characters’ mouths move so much when they are finishing talking. The only moving that the mouth should do after speaking is to close or whatever, depending upon the last sound. THIS is a good example of amazing cartoon lipsync (and amazing animation in general).

LIGHTING:

Your lighting is reasonable. Using BI with simple settings and having cubic subjects limits your lighting potential. But, it is also forgiving for those reasons. Effectively, you only have a key light and a rim/fill light setup. Usually the ambient light is enough to fill the shadows, especially outdoors with the environmental lighting. So, you mainly only have to think about a key light. However, some of the shots could use fill lights, especially indoors. It looks like you only use practical lights. Using more creatively place lights for mood would help a lot, but you would need to be careful that you don’t randomly add lights.

Every light that you add should have a believable “source”. Many of your lights that are not obvious practicals seem like they are floating. Here is an example. The vehicles should primarily emit light from their headlights. And, the headlights should be spot lamps where the cone intersects the ground. It looks like you use area lamps, which give a weak glow that isn’t becoming to a headlight. To light the sides of a vehicle, you could put underside lights on them. But, the underside lights should be small strips. If done incorrectly, it may look more like the vehicle is sitting on a bright spot. Some of your vehicles look like they are sitting on bright spots. It is unclear if you actually placed them on top of a lamp or if the light is bleeding from the headlights since they are not spot lamps. Either way, it looks odd.

And, you could use different color temperatures for your lights. Nearly all the lights seem to be white. Indoors, the lights should be 2700K. In the daylight, they should be 5000K (5600K with some blue scattered by the atmosphere). Then, you could use more mood lights, like green lights shining from under the operating table. That set needs more light anyway.