Dune Opening Title

#1

Hello CGSociety Community,

I am a final year Digital Media student at Edinburgh’s Napier University. I would like to kindly ask your opinion about my graduate project. At the moment, I am at the evaluation phase of the project and your feedback would greatly help me developing my final report.

Some words about the project. I have created an alternative opening title of the 1984 Dune movie. Everything has been developed from scratch using Cinema 4D and it’s Physical Renderer. The initial idea of the animation was to gradually reveal a control room from close up shots. However, I could not model the navigator and the room in great detail due to time constraints. Additionally, the planned camera movements could not be executed, since the render time was around an hour per frame. To overcome this, still frames have been rendered and animated and composited in After Effects.

//youtu.be/K9xnImo6zjg

I would be grateful for any feedback!

#2

The ‘Frank Herbert’ plate at 0.41 - you need to work on the relationship between the moving graphic and the chair - it looks like a masked 2d object rather than a 3d object. I’m not convinced at the focal relationship at all.

In the same way, the perspective part of the chair arm - the back of the chair arm is pin sharp, the chair arm is total blur and the BG is mid blur - that doesn’t make sense.

Try cutting out the chair flat, keeping the circle and back of the arm, lose the perspective part altogether, keep it all sharp and defocus the BG. If you feel it’s not visual interesting enough you can always rack focus (no, cancel that, just seen you do it in the next shot) or introduce a parallax movement - maybe a dolly down - you haven’t used the vertical plains much so that would be a new visual feature.

Also I notice your first graphic is one of the few that has no animation. Why?
Are you thinking “I’ll open with this, everyone will be like ‘wow’, and then I’ll show them the better stuff later to stop them getting bored?”

In my experience that ain’t how it works. Open with your second best punch, mix up the big and little punches, then finish with your hammerblow.

Or to put it another way, I sat thru 7 seconds of black screen and text, and the first thing you show me is a still with nothing happening? Are you daring me not to switch off?

Other than that, fine. Lovely photorealistic look, good use of tone, a lot of control and technique, yes, it’s good. I would have like some sort of payoff at the end, but I understand the restraints you were working under.

BTW those restraints you mentioned - not enough time, and not enough render time - those will NEVER go away. You eventually get longer deadlines and more render hours, but then you have to produce more and more complex pieces. Much off the job consists of how little can you do and get away with - and I don’t mean that in a cynical or lazy way, I mean it in a resource management way.

I wonder, if you had to do it all again, would the idea of saying straight away “There are 13 shots - shots 2-12 will be done in AFX and Photoshop, shots 1 and 13 in C4D.”, because that’s a good lesson to take away from a project like this.

Cheers
RB

#3

Hello RichardB,

Thank you for time and honest comments. Yeah, the DOF might be a slightly overdone with the chair scenes. That is how I tried to hide the poorly modeled navigator. Thanks for pointing out the that I should have built up the order of the shots with better care considering the impact they are having. Specially the long wait before something actually happens.
I agree what you are saying about time and render time. I know it’s a shame that I was not able to finish the animation on time. I have never worked on a scale of a project like this, however it really draw my attention on the importance of planning and time management.
If I would do the project again, I would definitely try to render the whole thing as a sequence, so I could play more with camera movements and the right parallax. And of course finish the modeling in time.

Thanks for you feedback, I really appreciate it!

#4

These things that I mentioned are repairable - that’s why I highlighted them.
Do you plan to fix any of them?

#5

Yes, I’m planning to fix them! :slight_smile:

#6

While I think you’ve done good work here and the compositing is decent, nothing about this animation harkens to Dune for me. Neither the old movie or the feel of the series at all. While this may not be an issue for you, I imagine any instructor who has seen it, or the new movies (MUCH better), or read the books will feel the same way. It looks like you’re demonstrating 1960s-era tech here, instead of 5,000AD tech. Sure, the Lynch film had a lot of retro elements, but not quite like this if that makes any sense?

But I wish you luck on this project! The quality level is at a good point, but I also agree that even two animated parts would do you more justice here.

#7

I think all of us need to be very careful about presuming what instructors or examiners or anyone else thinks- for my part I think this is an original take on a familiar subject and I’m happy not to see a rethreading of old accepted cliches. I especially like the little details, like the unfamiliar text and labelling.

I also think you need to do what seems right for you on the subject, if you start trying to make work that’s just second-guessing the status quo, you may as well give up.

“Hey Picasso - this is not what the instructor had in mind when he said draw a woman’s face”

#8

I can party with that, some good ideas and intentions there. But Picasso would have failed any honest art class, and it’s only through Modernism that such garbage became acceptable much less revered. Bad example. Picasso could NOT draw a face.

#9

http://www.mcguilmet.com/articles/could-picasso-really-paint-yeshe-really-could-as-the-evidence-shows

–s