Animation Short "Hold the Line" finally online

[tuna]

The URL points to a completely different short film. Also shouldn't this be posted in the finished animation section?

[edit] Okay, you fixed the URL now. This thread will probably be moved to the other forum though.

[edit2] MOAB! I'll stop whining now, I enjoyed the short it was funny :) Congratulations on it!

[SemAssink]

thats strange, it indeed linked to the wrong site.
changed it, so it must work fine now,
and sorry the first ten seconds of the film are black... will try to fix that too.

and euh... yeah maybe should just better post it in the finished animation section :s

[ParamountCell]

Hey bro! Daniel here, glad to see this movie at last! It was very funny.

[ENL]

Great Work!. The color and lighting were superb and the concept is original...

Two Thumbs Up!

[esheldon]

Good work, I really enjoyed watching this short. How long had the team been working on it?

[SemAssink]

thanx a lot!
The total duration of the project (from concept to final rendering) was nine months.
But of the whole team you can see at the credits Niels de Groen worked on the project for six months and I worked the whole nine months. The rest of the team (like camera, edit and sound) worked something like a month on the project.

It was really much fun to work with these people and I really hope to work with them again some day!

[switchblade327]

Nice work, Sem. I'm glad I finally got to see this!

[adib]

Very very very good work BRAVOO!:thumbsup:

[joancabot]

Excelent. Specially camera work and backgrounds. Congratulations.

[dondixon]

I really dig the camera pans to each character when they hold the line in sqaure form the extra whoosh sound with the cam made it extra cool. Really good job, I have respect for anyone that starts and completes a short! :)


Don

[RobertoOrtiz]

great work!

Plugged!
-R

[RobW720]

this was great! loved the whole art direction of it. Amazing backgrounds, fun character animation, two thumbs up.

[Loolarge]

This was so entertaining! The voices are great and everthing else too :) It is a very funny setting. Congrats.

[Jadetiger]

Very good! Love the characters. I've seen a lot of animations lately that do not have real dialogue but rather gibberish which is great because then you don't have to deal with the language barrier and I think you pulled it off nicely. <--- (very bad run on sentence)

[inline243]

Very cool, you guys did a great job. I really like the background art.

[centurionit]

That is awesome guys...an incredible work you have done here!!!
Funny and excellent job :thumbsup:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=445067

[SemAssink]

Thanks for all the positive reactions!

I see a lot of you like the backgrounds, thanks!
It was great fun creating those although it was a big struggle as well to get them right.

My intention was to make a very dark and silent atmosphere, where the ruins of a massive war would give a pressing feeling of loneliness and fear. I found the inspiration at the old Romantic Painters like Friedrich and a lot of First World War pictures of abandoned misty trenches.

Second thing was that only the characters where 3D, all the backgrounds are 2D, so together they had to fit perfectly in perspective.

But after all I think painted backgrounds can give a more sensitive and athmosperic feeling then completely 3D created backrounds -unless you are a fantastic modeller/texturer, which I am not ;)

[JoppeBakke]

Great movie! It's a pity I didn't see it in a cinema...

Also a good thing to see it on the front page

[HellBoy]

loved the whole project. Very entertaining

:thumbsup:

[yencaray]

Great job! Really enjoyed Watching this. I like your work in putting the 3d with 2d backgrounds you pulled it off nicely!

[cgbinho]

Really cool and funny short, congratulations to the team!!

only crit would be that i felt the characters didn´t fit really well into the enviroment... maybe they needed a little more subtle texture work.. ? you know.... to do justice with the amazing paintings you guys created.

don´t know, maybe it´s just me... anywayz, i enjoyed very much!!! loved that nervous guy firing acidentally.. !!!

edit - ohh i forgot, any chance for a .mov version? i want it!

[KINGOFPAIN]

nice work man.. ko0l vid. :thumbsup:

[GaryDXD]

Sem,

I absulutely loved it! I love the mixture of 2D matte painted backgrounds with 3D characters. The only thing I do not care for is the end credit treatment.

[WesleyTack]

This has got to be one of the funniest shorts I've seen over the past year (you just made it). And this coming from my Noorderburen, great work, loved it!

[kr3ml]

wow man, awesome work, the film is both funny and very serious at times.
Have you tried to make a festival run with it? Cuz I think this is a good enough quality film for an academy award nom.

great work 5 stars :thumbsup:

[OKMER]

helemaal te gek!!!Love the backgrounds and the kind a black humor in it!!!
Congrats!!!

[Soyseitan]

Hi Sem,

congratulations on making the frontpage of the cgtalk forums ! Great video btw, but we already knew that :)

grtz. Bjorn (Shosho)

[Delude]

always tough the war was held by a hand full of stupid little fellows, setting their own course going nowhere,while grooving to their own music.
and now i'm certain. :twisted:

great job :thumbsup: especially the compositing part.

[monks]

Very good work here ! Really like your backgrounds, the character design and the animation are very good. Congrats.

[SemAssink]

Thanks all for your replies! I appreciate it a lot :)

hey Cgbinho,
yes, maybe you are right about the texturing. As you can see, they got no texturing at all at the moment. That's because at the moment of creating the characters we didn't know how to texture well. We could teach ourselves offcourse, but then we had less time to animate, composite and for creating the backgrounds. So I decided to leave it as it was.
What I do like now is that because they have no texturing they've got more like a Muppet feeling. And I really wanted a Muppet kinda feeling in the characters, I love Muppets :)

@ AcOrN
thx :) and yes after Hold the Line was finished in 2005 I sent it to multiple festivals. Like 15 showed it allready, which I'm very proud of :)


cheers
Sem

[Tasimasu]

ahaahah private make me laugh so much :D

[loocas]

Fantastic short, man! I love the plot and the story, great idea, very true indeed...

The visual style and everything was just perfect, no crits from me just http://forums.cgsociety.org/images/rating/rating_5.gif :applause:

[danshewan]

To echo the sentiments of previous posts, the environments were really well done - I particularly like the opening shot. The subtle motion of the flags billowing in the distance was a nice touch.

Also, some good particle work with the blast from the bombs detonating, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet - really nice. Funny thing is, right before the soldier behind the squad leader twangs his radio antennae, I was just thinking how much I'd like to do that! Really funny, great atmosphere, and well worth the front page.

Congratulations on the festival entries, and for the short in general. Nice one, mate. :thumbsup:

[mech7]

:thumbsup: great short funny to really like the backgrounds

[DDS]

absolutely great!! A little more fast paced might have been better, but it wasn't boring at all. Niiiiiiiiiiiice :thumbsup:

[SemAssink]

Also, some good particle work with the blast from the bombs detonating, which I don't think anyone has mentioned yet - really nice.

hey Danshewan,
yeah fun thing you mentioned the particles.
At the moment I worked on the blast shot coincedently some fellow students were creating some test-shots with throwing rubble in front of a black background.
the blast you see in the background of the film is a shot of falling powder. I just rotated the shot and burned out the colors.
In the front you see some big peaces of rock and paper to create more depth.
Fun thing is they threw a little Carter doll in front of the camera as well. I'm not sure if I used it though :D

All together a simple technique, but a very effective one

[Krimble2000]

Hey Sem,

Great work !!!
I'm gonna talk dutch now because you're from Amsterdam.

Een hele tijd terug heb ik op advies van Ron Dotsch (vriend van jou toch?) de trailer gezien. Ron zou de dvd een keer meenemen om heel de film te kijken, maar dat heeft hij nooit gedaan (Ron is een collega\vriend van me).
Ik was dus aangenaam verrast toen ik een soldaatje van Hold the line in de cgtalk Header zag staan!
De stijl van de film is erg goed, en ik denk dat de karakters geen textures nodig hebben, ze springen er nu zo goed uit. (maar ja ieder zijn mening).

Ron zei dat je werk had gevonden bij guerrilla games, erg cool voor je!

[gpepper]

Excellent !
Very effective work !
The use of the background is really good ! Great artwork !
The story gives us a true reflexion about war and the reason of war...
Sometimes a stupid guy is the source of the confict...

[snips]

Very nice

How did you did the explotions-titles thing in the end?

[jhuasdas87bd]

i laughed it a lot :) really good. the most beautiful thing is fire effects (machine guns' fire) i think really nice. congratulations

[Koen86]

Wow! Congrats on the front page! Nice to see some quality animation from dutch grounds.
Hope to see more of your work.

Grtz Koen

[bluka]

greate work!!!

[Meken]

Hey Sem,

Great, that the film is getting such a good response. You know we all liked it, but it makes me look at the whole thing in a different light now that other people are having their first look. Oh and I'm actually looking at the poster now, which is on my bedroom wall! ;-)
Someone noticed 'my' flags in the distance! Cool...

Sem, hope your ISP costs won't make you go broke. ;-) Happy New Year... (we still have to meet over coffee!)

[bigp3rm]

I have seen a lot of great work on cgsociety and this is one of the best pieces IMO. The mood and feeling of it all was excellent.

Someone posted that they wanted textures on the models. I couldn't disagree more. The contrast between the backgrounds and the characters was perfect. It allowed you to focus on each element separately. This made the character animation really shine.

Don't change a thing and I hope to see more of this short in the future. 5 stars from me.

[cgbinho]

What I do like now is that because they have no texturing they've got more like a Muppet feeling. And I really wanted a Muppet kinda feeling in the characters, I love Muppets :)

ha! i like muppets too... now I see the direction you´ve gone.
when we can get a quicktime file?? i guess that i´m not the only one ! :D

[vrljc]

that was pretty dang good!

[thx1138]

What can I say, great little movie you've got there. Funny and kinda dark at the same time. Excellent. The integration of the 2D backgrounds was done very well.

Hope to see more in the future :thumbsup:

[AlexC]

Great work, the animation was really well done. :bounce: :applause:

[pensart]

Amazing cool animation :buttrock:
Will there be an downloadable version soon?

[Frubes]

Technically a very nice piece i think with a wonderful atmosphere conveyed through the painted imagery. I felt the narrative of the story was lacking a little and sometimes unclear but not having read the whole post im not sure what your intentions where behind the piece. Great attention to detail and very amusing.

4**** from me

Mark

[behzad]

Good technical work, but I got lost in the story, also I am not sure but I felt the story dragged on too long.

[betito]

The link doesn't work anymore, I guess I'm late

[Greentea|]

Yep, seems video has been taken down :(

[ftaswin]

second request: Any downloadable version (QT)?

Need to store it straight into my inspiration folder :P


Ft

[ratatat]

hilarious! loved the overall tone of the story and the animation was really nice. best of luck on the circuit.

cheers :applause:

[PhuongDPh]

I can't find Youtube link, :cry: :cry: :cry:
I want to watch that, thanks !

[Xlars]

wonderful movie. Sad to see it was taken down now I wanted to see it again.

I possible, please make a downloadble version (eg. MOV format like the trailer) - makes it much more easy to see and enjoy again and again without being dependend on a internet site, serverload, youtube or similar. Alternatively put the internet adress in the trailer and make sure that site is not taken down in the next 10 years or so :-)

[lehmi]

I found it to be a lot too long... expecially if you use no real dialog and just some sort of brabbling you should shorten it alot more... also the longer you try to make it the better the pointe at the very end has to be - otherwise people feel like they have invested a lot of time watching it, but don't get payed enough...

Backgrounds are really great... but honestly the characters don't fit... the backgrounds look dirty, worn and are in some sort of illustrated photorealism - but the characters are totally overproportioned, clean and simple... but maybe that's just my taste... but I never had the feeling they blend very good.

[SemAssink]

wonderful movie. Sad to see it was taken down now I wanted to see it again.
If possible, please make a downloadable version (eg. MOV format like the trailer)





Hey people,
so sorry the film is offline ("Hold the Line" is taken literary now ;) )
The problem was that because of the unsuspected success the short is downloaded so many times right now. I went over the limit of 30 Gig a month by far (right now it is like 14 Gig an hour!).


But in a few hours it will be online again as a Youtube-clip.


About the downloadable version... I would like to do that, but does anybody know how to get this short online somewhere without having the problem I just mentioned above?


greets,
Sem

[Machin]

Amazing work!
I love this sort of style!:thumbsup:

[doylle]

Amazing work, and i only saw the trailer so far... :thumbsup:

[SemAssink]

Happy new year to you all!!
Thanx again for the compliments and the critics.
So I said due to the high amount of trafic I had to remove the film from my site, but now you can find at least a YouTube link. The quelity is less, but I hope you can still enjoy it :)

Will there be an downloadable version soon?
Yes there will be a downloadable version soon.
Going to fix that somewhere this week (and it will be a higher quality version then the YouTube one ;))

[Santaquiteria]

Great work Sem!

Congratulations to you and to Niels too, hope to see more personal stuff of yours in the future!


P.S. If you still need some mirrors for the quicktime, I have some extra space in my hosting


-Victor, aka Crouch-Right-Dive-Roll

[Lasphere]

hahahaha very nice :D haha love it !

[ibzee33]

Hey,

Gr8 work buddy, the paintings were gra8, animation was awesome, espically the explosion.
fantastice work, A MASTER Piece.

Ibe

[damncreative]

Loved it. Very nice characters. And offcourse good treatment to the whole movie as well. good job..

[dominicqwek]

Great start to the new year Sem! I'm sure more good things are coming along. Keep animating! :)

[firstsingle]

Good job mate. You know, it's always the clown in the back of the line that causes all the trouble. I wanted to shoot him myself.

[FRENZIEDmind]

Nice work... and you managed to get the youtube.com file to have fairly decent resolution.

I love their heroic chins. They should be able to win the war from that alone! ;) Great character designs and animatics.

crit: Are we supposed to know what they are saying? I can only understand a couple of words.

second request: Any downloadable version (QT)?Third request... that is when you get more bandwidth.

[SemAssink]

crit: Are we supposed to know what they are saying? I can only understand a couple of words.
Third request... that is when you get more bandwidth.

Hey Mark,
thanks for your reaction!
About the mumbling of the characters: The idea is that you indeed cannot understand what they are saying.
But, you should understand what they mean by their basic and primitive emotions.
Its also to show an abstract version of military language. they don't even know what they are saying themselves (that's why the command they pass through in the beginning ends up in a misunderstanding)
They are in this war for so long, they don't even have the ability to talk properly anymore.
Communication is a basic foundation of a civilised society. And war clearly kills any civilization ;)

cheers,
Sem

p.s. this higher quality downloadable version will be there soon!

[thinksink]

Very Cool! Enjoyed this very much. Can't wait to learn how to be doing this.

[viiltaja]

Heya, this is funny one, good work! Nice you've added different personality to all four characters. It's also a good idea to make everyone think there has to be enemy somewhere because of massive war machines and ruined surroundings even if there was no one. Mayby that's why it's even funnier those soldiers are so paranoic.

[darcru]

Hehehe this was awesome. the mumbling was hilarious..and especially some of the facial expressions while they were reacting to the mumbling. Very well done indeed

[SemAssink]

Thanks for the cool reactions everyone!
It's also a good idea to make everyone think there has to be enemy somewhere because of massive war machines and ruined surroundings even if there was no one. Mayby that's why it's even funnier those soldiers are so paranoic.
Yeah indeed, the war is allready over for maybe a very long time, but as you can see the war still goes on in their paranoic heads :)

Sem

[Cirnoc]

Great Work!

[Glacierise]

Great short, really enjoyed it! All round great! The backgrounds were a bit static at some spots (where the bombs we blowing up), but nothing to really whine about. Bravo!

[Toadsoup]

Hey I really liked your animation. I think the combination of 2d and 3d worked really well. I really like the part where the rocket is launching. The smoke trail is done very well.

I put a link to your site and a couple words about the animation on my site.

http://toadsoup.com/2007/01/hold-the-line/

[Toadsoup]

Whoops, double posted!!

[SemAssink]

I put a link to your site and a couple words about the animation on my site. http://toadsoup.com/2007/01/hold-the-line/

Thanks Todd!
I appreciate it a lot (and nice site btw ;) )

[SemAssink]

second request: Any downloadable version (QT)?
Need to store it straight into my inspiration folder :P
Ft

Yes here it is...

(...finally)
You can download "Hold the Line" on High Resolution from the site (www.holdtheline.nl (http://www.holdtheline.nl))

!Enjoy! :applause:

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