CGTalk - Welcome to Clue Manor

View Full Version : Welcome to Clue Manor - A short

mclane41

01-03-2005, 09:01 PM

Hey homies. I've been coming to the forum for awhile and have finally gathered up the courage to post one of my shorts online. I did this short around seven months ago and I've done better work since then, but this is the short that everyone seems to like. The whole thing is basically an experiment in storytelling. It took me seventeen weeks between classes to create it and there were some things I would do different but I had a deadline so I wasn't able to. But enough of that.

The short was inspired by the game of Clue. For those who aren't familiar with it, its a board game where players have to solve a murder. This includes identifying the killer, what room it was done in, and what weapon was used. I decided to use this concept to devise a story that I would tell in one long camera shot. I was inspired by the long seamless takes of directors like Brian Depalma, David Fincher, and Martin Scorcese. But I also wanted to use some of the more out there camera techniques of directors like Tsui Hark and Dario Argento. So I kind of put the two of them together to create a unique style of telling the story.

Here are the specs on the video:
Welcome to Clue Manor
running Time: 6min 16 seconds
dimensions: 320X240 (sorry about the small size; didn't have divx at the time)
file size: 60MB

Link: http://www.animationportfolio.com/clue.mpg

Hope ya enjoy it.

KevinCCAD

01-05-2005, 02:04 AM

It's nice that you were able to model so many objects in that short time but it looks like your textures suffered from that time spent. The textures give almost everything a plasticy feel. I know you were trying to go for a certain feel with the flying camera but personally it doesn't work for me, the flying camera seems to be like the easy way out and a sterotype of computer animation. Also the dead guy looks weird, it might've been nice to just leave out the body and put in a shiny puddle of spilled blood or at least give him a texture that looks like skin. From what I can tell about the guy, it seems you got carried away and ended up with too much geometry too early in the modeling process. I'd attempt to keep it simple and get the important shapes right before you work in details. the blood looks a little odd too, maybe you should've modeled it instead. I noticed a lot of things didn't have a noticable shadow, without them everything feels kinda stale and the light isn't really felt.

mclane41

01-05-2005, 10:09 PM

Thanks for the comment Kev. I was actually going for that look with the textures though. When I was studying the board game, everything had a certain gloss to it and I was trying to capture that. I know I wasn't as successful with certain textures as others, but some of it also has to do with the small resolution. I did wish I had more time on to work with the guy though because he was the last thing that I did before my deadline. I appreciate the comments and tips though. Thanks for watching it.

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