MariaAwakens: Demo/portfolio machinima vid

chip

end result of my work with the Maria2205 model i was pimping a few weeks back -- 90 secs of all-original content packed into a 5.12Mb XviD demo. credit crawl gives some tech info for those interested.

Maria Awakens

hope you enjoy it. comments, crits and feedback are encouraged.

chip

i've discovered that the XviD codec may not be as popular and/or widespread as I anticipated, so if you're having probs viewing the vid, here's a link to the site where a binary executable for the codec can be found:

Koepoi's XviD codec

the DL link is under the "Latest Stable Binary" heading.

support Open Source.

Mark Dygert

As an animation demo it doesn't show a whole lot. If you plan on sending this out to places as a sample animation then you might want to get some more movement, run walk cycles, crouch, jump, bending, kind of stuff. Since I am not really sure what the purpose is of this vid I am left kind of wondering?

I also have an issue with the way she wakes up. It has been my experience that people wake up from the head down. The head being the first thing to show signs of movement and alertness and the limbs trailing behind starting off sluggish and getting closer to normal as time goes on. Watch a few movies where someone is drugged strapped to a chair and watch what comes around first and how sluggish thier arms and legs are to respond.

In the vid it looks like you start to hold true to this school of thought by picking up the head first, but then it drops back down as if she isn't really awake. then the leg twitch and the arm floating. When someone is waking up thier hands are kind of like slabs of meat attached to thier arms. They kind of hang there and the fingers don't do much. I would hang the hand down a bit from the arm and slowly raise the hand level with the arm and maybe twitch the fingers, then ball up a fist and release it slowly. Something to show a new level of awarness change, as if she just found out she has hands.

The knees I would push together and skew the feet to the left and the knees to the right. Maybe push her pelvis to the right and have her resting on her hip instead of the flat part of her rear? It takes a certain level of awareness to keep your legs locked in the sitting position. When people are truely sleeping they loose a certain amount of muslce control and things like legs kind of fall to default fetal positions and slump and fall on things around them.

The last bit is timed really well with the music and is it highlight of the piece. When she looks down and then stands up is well put together The rest needs some work but you are off to a good start

chip

good feedback, Vig, thanks for the observations. i'll definitely be doing more "standard" animation sequence examples along with this piece, which is intended as a demo/teaser for the machinima concept as well as a display of my production capabilities. perhaps i'm trying to accomplish too much in one short piece?

re: the waking, a more accurate (but less poetic-sounding) title might be "Maria Reanimates," as she is a synthetic human (paralleling the robot Maria of the original Metropolis) being "reborn" as alluded to in the prospective machinima's title. all of this is absolutley not apparent in the short, but i plan to present it in a larger context that will hopefully clarify these aspects of the "waking."

your points are well-taken, though, and i'll likely revisit the sequence after the larger body of animations is done.