Animated Short - This Wonderful Life

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."

Comments

Coralized Links

[excaliber19]

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

Re:Sheesh

[musicon]

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.

it's a total waste of render-time, really

[n3k5]

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.

BitTorrent

[placatedmayhem]

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?

A .torrent THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

[Anonymous Coward]

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.