Epsilon -- Student Senior Thesis
Hey guys this is our Senior Thesis which was worked on over the course of 8 months at Ringling College of Art and Design. We are apart of the Game Art and Design major and we were tasked to create a short cinematic trailer showcasing a unique world of our own.
We learned a great deal from this project and we would like to show you all what we came up with!
The entire short is rendered in UDK (Unreal Development Kit).
http://vimeo.com/22502890?ab
This was created by:
Cody Bellimer (GodfishB16) -- cbellime@c.ringling.edu -- http://webspace.ringling.edu/~cbellime
Christian Davis (cdavisrun) -- cdavis@c.ringling.edu -- http://www.christiandavisart.com
Jeremy Griffith (jarm) -- jgriffi1@c.ringling.edu -- http://www.jeremydgriffith.com
Matthew Heyman (skayne) -- mheyman89@gmail.com -- www.matthewheyman.com
We learned a great deal from this project and we would like to show you all what we came up with!
The entire short is rendered in UDK (Unreal Development Kit).
http://vimeo.com/22502890?ab
This was created by:
Cody Bellimer (GodfishB16) -- cbellime@c.ringling.edu -- http://webspace.ringling.edu/~cbellime
Christian Davis (cdavisrun) -- cdavis@c.ringling.edu -- http://www.christiandavisart.com
Jeremy Griffith (jarm) -- jgriffi1@c.ringling.edu -- http://www.jeremydgriffith.com
Matthew Heyman (skayne) -- mheyman89@gmail.com -- www.matthewheyman.com
Replies
Loved the trailer and the concept.
Overall it looks sweet, I'm sure it'll go well for all of you.
I would love any feedback or critique you guys might have. Always wanting to learn and grow.
Most of the architecture was done by me and the design was a collaboration via critique. On the first page the foreground architecture was done by Matthew Heyman and the skeletons were done by me. Also the skybox in the earlier shots are property of Epic games.
In the second shot the foliage was done by Matthew Heyman and Jeremy Griffith along with the waterfalls.
@ParoXum: It's really great to hear that from the Beam-em-up winner. I have to admit that you were a pretty big inspiration to our project and wanted to say thank you. And yeaaa there are alottt of stuff we would like to sweeten up and a lot of things got rushed. We have tons of stuff that we designed that we wanted to implement but had to get cut. Hopefully one day we could continue on the project and show all that we wanted.
some criticism though, without raining on your parade, to help you guys become even better:
the cut is horrible. it sounds like the music was first and the footage had to fill.
the voice acting is nosy. don't know if that's intentional, but I'd have prefered a clearer voice that speaks more ahead.
the cameras all seem to use FOV 60 or something crazy high. try doing some of these shots with FOV 10 and utilize Depth of Field.
the color grading is non existant? To me the different environments look too different, mainly due to the hue .
the story was kind of weird and didn't make any sense, i'd say it's the wrong scenes for a trailer. felt like two or three cutscenes directly after another.
the animation was sometimes not so good, but the bigger offender: in parts completely missing. Doing just a very small anticipating move, an idle or anything like that would have saved these shots.
to not end this post like this, i'll point out a few things that I really liked:
The animation on the skeleton at the moment the diamond is taken.
The shot in the thread opening (in the trailer 1:31).
the character design for your protagonist and the stone golem
the scene with the volcano had a great sense of depth and could be a cool concept for a God of War or Uncharted kind of level, where you have to fight over the bridge and into the temple.
nah. im pretty sure it was a senior college project. :poly124:
Don't quote me on this but to my basic understanding. You have your typical 4 years of high school, then you can go off to a college for 2 - 4 years.
The 4th year being the "senior" year. 3rd being "junior" etc.
To reply to some of your crits. While developing we had one idea for the film and came up with some thumbnails and an animatic. We got one song that we thought was going in the right direction and our plan was to actually hire a composer to do the film....that fell through.
The voice acting was actually done by an actor hired from the school to do voice work for other student films and we couldn't get the voice we really wanted so we edited it in a program. Through critique people didn't mind it so we stuck with it.
We Totally agree with you on the FOV and DOF critique. It is definitely something we are going to go back to and fixing, especially with the new UDK update.
The narration I can see as still be pretty hard to "read" but we went through tons of iterations and the final one seemed to get the most points of our story across. We still have tons and tons of back story that was created but never got told. Sorry I didn't read for you
And thank you for your words!
I would be more than happy to answer any and all questions btw.
I cant speak for all colleges or schools as they vary drastically throughout the US, but I can tell you about Ringling College of Art and Design. It takes 4 years of classes to graduate and in your "Senior Year" most students typically do a senior project. In the Computer Animation department it is usually a 1-2 min. short film focusing on character animation, and in game art (we are the first graduating class) it was to make a game trailer focusing on environments.
@grey: Thanks man
@slipsius: yeaaa that would have been ideal, problem was we initially tried tying the first environment with the second in case we could make it playable but that caused to many problems, like lighting and bake times, so we decided to split it up and I had to transfer my environment to a new scene, thus losing my exact camera angle. Then I had some nasty problems with the volcano and again had to transfer my files. All in all, lesson learned, don't get problems.
But like I said, its a minor crit on a really great piece of work.