I’m using iclone8 to (all too slowly…) animate a historical novel that I wrote a long time ago. Its title is A Pocket Full of Shells, and is set in Cleveland, Ohio in 1964. I say in the Intro that I don’t like trigger warnings, but realistically I think I’d better include one here. This flashback to the summer of 1954 involves a sudden, life-changing trauma that my book’s protagonist suffers at age 12.
Anyway, I hope this youtube link works.
PS I don’t understand why thumbnails never show up in my posts. Everybody else gets nice pictures accompanying their youtube links to draw in the viewer’s attention, but not me! I just get a bland line of blue text. This is not the first time this has happened! WHAT am I doing wrong?
youtube.com/watch?v=l6cgsDvYlnw
Not sure what’s causing that John. When I paste a youtube link (both in the subject and in the body) the video quickly appears in the preview window. Hopefully Peter or someone can help you with that.
My first thought was that the lighting is flat, the motions are a bit awkward and the voices are squeaky… but…matching all that with the stormy effects and ominous music makes for a pretty effective nightmarish vibe. I didn’t feel any trigger warning were needed but that’s me.
I would focus on camera, lighting and animation for improvement.
The camera moves around a lot here where maybe straight cuts would be more effective. Also you can use better angles to hide minor errors like the feet floating above ground at 2:44.
Outdoor lighting is very difficult but the ground could have used some textures and better lighting would make the scenes a bit more dynamic (not so flat) especially on your characters where the flat look makes the skin look like plastic.
Re: motions - The friends running off at the end could be improved using the motion director (jogging is available for free) which would cut the foot slipping and look much more realistic.
Overall its a solid early effort. Keep at it!
Apart from what @thebiz.movies already said:
- The textures on the school bus need to be higher resolution; the text on the rear end looks pretty bad.
- The cherry bombs are flying too slowly for such a flat/straight trajectory; either make them fly faster or curve the trajectory (or both).
- The grip on the baseball bat could be improved (finger positions).
- Try to get better textures overall.
- The grins of the kids showing teeth is a bit creepy, but perhaps that is intentional.
- Although it’s raining toward the end, the kids’ clothes are dry.
- At the end, when the one kid tries to drag the injured one to get help, the motion needs a bit of work (although it is not an easy action to animate).
- Logic question: Why do the kids pull such as stunt on school grounds when they might be caught by some adult? Since this is just an excerpt, perhaps context not shown here would explain that.
What are you trying to do this for? To post as an animated series on your YT channel? If you plan on making additional episodes, I would strongly suggest doing experiments with improving the visual style/look of the render first. If you create several episodes over some time (say, several months) and the style changes from episode to episode (because you learn more about lighting, texturing, rendering, etc., and the visual quality keeps improving) that may make for an awkward experience for the viewer who watches several episodes in continuity.
You mentioned that this clip is a flashback and that the “main” action takes place in 1964. Are you planning a different look/style for the flashback and the “main” part?
All that being said, I think you should keep at it. Could be an interesting series.
That could be due to MorphVox Pro being used. Eleven Labs may be a better choice, but I’m not sure how many kid voices they have.
Finally, I didn’t need the trigger warning either. 
In the future click the “share” button Under your video and use that link for the forum.
OK, I’ll try that. Thanks!
Thank you both thebiz.movies and Nirwana for your feedback. You guys echoed a lot of what I felt about it myself. It’s going to be part of a piece I’m posting on vimeo, where I can re-upload edited videos to the same url, unlike youtube. This will always be a work in progress, and I’ve been working on it sporadically for six years. I’ve got to find some way to balance it with my work on sculpture. I keep telling myself I’m going to set an alarm clock so I can work an hour on one and an hour on the other, but it never works out that way.
But here’s a link to what I’ve managed to make of it so far, up to the flashback: A Pocket Full of Shells, installment one
Hmm, I used the “share” button at vimeo to create a link to post here, but it still didn’t work. I’m having the same problem with my emails. No matter which of my several email accounts I use, no matter what browser I use, thumbnails never show in the emails I send. They used to, but now they don’t.
Yes, being able to “update” videos is IMO about the only advantage Vimeo has over YouTube. Apart from having to pay for some necessary goodies, the main disadvantage (and the reason I pretty much gave up on Vimeo, even if I still have some old content there) is the number of views (both potential and actual).
I watched Installment One, and while it shared some of the same issues the Flashback has, I liked it better overall, even though I wouldn’t have made some of the creative choices (such as using real TV footage and pictures—that is a pet peeve of mine; I find it distracting in a stylized animation. If I did not want to or could not re-create the stuff in 3D from scratch, I’d probably use a filter on real-life photos/footage to give the material a more cartoonish or stylized look that is closer to the visual style of the animation).
Now, I think a project like this (which is near and dear to the creator’s heart), faces a few fundamental issues:
On the one hand, if undertaken by a single person who does it all, the stuff takes forever to make (as evidenced by the fact that Installment One was posted 3.5 years ago), while on the other hand the average viewer, who is not as invested in the subject, is typically not going to wait for years to get to the next installment.
What is more, I don’t think this kind of animation is ever going to rack up a lot of views (although the algorithms can be fickle and surprising at times), so basically the project is primarily a creative outlet for the one making it (and perhaps for family and friends). What I’m saying is that being able to update the video is of little practical importance if (a) it is not done (or have you updated Installment One since the initial upload in 2021?) and (b) there are not enough old viewers that care about there being an updated version to be found under the same URL when it comes at the cost of a much lower potential audience.
When I “update” a video, I just upload the new version to YouTube and set the old one to “private”, or, if it hardly had any views in the first place, delete it outright.