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Animated Short - This Wonderful Life

Posted by michael on from the hamster-havoc dept.

dfluke2 writes "It's been around for awhile, but Lian Kemp's This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short. Over at rendernode there is an interview with Lian, where additional background information can be found about the flick, including other plans for more animated movies. The author also features a gallery with photo shoot style images of the female actress from the short."

10 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Coralized Links by excaliber19 · · Score: 4, Informative
    Coralized:

    http://www.this-wonderful-life.com.nyud.net:8090/i ndex.htm
    http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/
    http://www.rendernode.com.nyud.net:8090/articles.p hp?articleId=197

  2. Re:Something about that virtual actress... by edrams · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's a link at the top of the download page to cgchannel.com. I couldn't get that one to load though - just the previews on the homepage.

  3. Re:Nothing particularly *advanced* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    What do you mean "they"?

    his is one guy, who spent most of his professional life doing models for Games where they do not have to ba accurate at all.

    Liam did all the work on his own with no "they" at all to help him.

    Cripes, he used photoshop to make his own textures for her!

  4. Re:Sheesh by musicon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Um, given that I had to really screw around with the contrast and brightness to see what you're talking about, you've either got a seriously messed up monitor (I guess you never complained about DOOM3 being too dark?) or a really twisted need to look for those types of things.

    Of course, given that I felt compelled to verify doesn't say a lot about me either :) And besides, I thought you were really talking about this one.

  5. Re:CGI is improving, but not there yet by kbahey · · Score: 3, Informative

    You are right. Here is the second image which looks fake.

    --
    2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
  6. it's a total waste of render-time, really by n3k5 · · Score: 4, Informative
    This Wonderful Life is a very impressive animated short
    No, it isn't. It was schown at the Ars Electronica Festival, along with other animations nominated for the Prix Ars Electronica, and totally paled in comparison. Some of the shorts were full of artistic originality, showing off ideas and techniques most hadn't seen before, some were very funny, some were decent executions of some 'high concept', some were ambitious student films showing a fair share of talent; this one was just annoying. So they made two models (a woman and a baby) and scripted a couple of facial expressions for them. Decent craftsmanship, but standard 3DS Max fare, nothing you wouldn't also see in a high-budget Hollywood production with CGI actors.

    What made this annoying was the way they showed off their achivement (two models with facial expressions): They artificially constructed a 'storyline' in which the woman got to show as many emotions as possible, and due to the lack of a talented writer they ended up with nonsense and kitsch galore. The animation process doesn't use motion capturing or a physics engine or anything else that would further realism; it's old-school keyframe animation, which looks (in scenes like the one in which she jumps from one stone in the water to another) artificial and very out of place with these partly near-photorealistic images (she looks like a marionette draged along on wires). They're stuck deep in the uncanny valley (if you haven't heard that term before, google it; /. has also reported on this); most characters in Finding Nemo looked more human than this woman.

    This short looks like one painfully long commercial for the product they made; it's just a demo of the 3D models, and not a very impressive one. Also shown were the very humorous New Balls Please and the hilarious Pfffirate, which made the giggling audience gasp for air, but This Wonderful Life definitely got the most laughs -- they just weren't intended.

    But don't take my word for it; if you want to see a recent animated short that's very impressive, check out the documentary Ryan: "The audience hears the voices of real people who accompanied Ryan as he made his way through life. In the world of computer-animated film, these people speak through strange, distorted, broken, disembodied beings, humans whose exterior appearance comes across as bizarre, humorous or irritating." The author calls this style psycholrealism.
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    but what do i know, i'm just a model.
  7. doh! by wattersa · · Score: 3, Informative

    sorry folks, they deleted the torrent from the public tracker (theppn.com) for whatever reason and I'm sorry to say my home webserver isn't up for a slashdotting ;-)

  8. BitTorrent by placatedmayhem · · Score: 4, Informative

    Alright, kiddies... you asked for it, so it's been done.
    http://torrent.youceff.com/torrents/TWL360x208.mov .torrent

    Ya'll enjoy now, ya hear?

  9. Here Is Your Torrent by ephemeraleuphoria · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have a torrent of both this and the animated short pfffirate up at http://147.126.53.117:6969/ Enjoy :)

    --
    michael greene
  10. A .torrent THAT ACTUALLY WORKS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative



    Here's a tracker with the complete 26 mb movie that actually seems to work:

    http://147.126.53.117:6969

    Plus the "Pffirate" animated feature is there too.