***LIGHTSABER CHOREOGRAPHY COMPETITION IV - RELEASE THREAD***

Whoa. 6. People. actually. voted. for. us.


I'm blown away. So are the rest of the judges reviews still forthcoming? It kinda sucks being entry #15. If it had been "bgii_2000 & Oingoboingo" rather than "Oingoboing & bgii_2000" we woulda been #1. How weird is that? I sense a biblical quote from JediPastor...

 

Congrats to Centius and crew as well as to Jedi Pastor, because that was an excellent analogy.
Also, well done to all participants. It was a lot of fun to watch.
Ok, trying to catch several thoughts all at once so onto the choreo videos. I think it is an excellent idea, because it allows people (like me) to enter without worrying about rotoscoping, though that didn't seem to be an issue in the fight category.
I like JediPastor's idea of submitting a a choreo video, having it rated then redoing the fight. Hey, you may not changed it
I'm all for keeping the choreo contest, my two cents

 

I'm still waiting for some unfinished reviews;
It would be lovely to see them! ^_^

 

Congratulations to Centius and his crew. And to Spiff I give you thanks for your critical judging of our video and all other reviews it has helped me to learn what we did wrong and how to fix it.


Twas a great contest.

farewell

 

So who was everyone? Which person were you in the videos?

I was the guy in black during the majority of the video (I'm wearing the "Born Again" shirt in the choreo video). My sparring partner Bryan (not a member of these boards) was the "Jedi" as well as the "Sith" in the close ups.

 

I was the one with the white tee shirt and the purple light saber in Bums With Lightsabers ( the one who is killed first.)

 

Here are WhisperingDeath's reviews. He's out of town so he sent them to me.



Judge ?Whispering Death?

Let me introduce this by wasting no time in naming Entry 1 as my vote for best of the competition. Honorable mentions go to entries 8, 12, and 13.
I hope I wasn?t too brief in my reviews of each one, this thing ended up being 12 pages and for a largely illiterate Texas hillbilly like myself that?s quite a marathon. I don?t write this much for most of my school papers.
Now I said before that I was a tad unimpressed overall with this competition. That need not be a negative. I see this as a wide open opportunity for someone to blow this thing wide open in the next competition. For those of you contemplating entering in LCC5 I have a few words. There is a huge gap above the best LCC films, huge amounts of opportunity just waiting for someone to take. Be unorthodox. Don?t sit around striking body blow after body blow; go for the legs and the hands. Take elements and tools that are used one way and innovate ways for them to be used in another way. For the love of god would someone PLEASE work the clinch and the ground game! Sabers are obviously meant as ranged stand-up weapons, but there is a huge opportunity in finding ways to bring the fight to the clinch and the ground. In ?Ryan vs. Dorkman? arguably the most memorable portion is their ground exchanges. It?s almost as if 2/3rds all martial arts learning is just sitting there unused, waiting for someone to take it. And, finally, go over your choreography with a red editing pen? now cross out anything that might make the viewer believe the two fighters actually do not want to hurt each other. If you are going to write a prize-winning novel you can?t just come up with cool ideas, you have to edit. Similarly, if you want to reach greatness in your choreography you have to edit and revise.

There are a good number of these LCC4 contestants that I desperately want to see re-double their efforts, learn from their mistakes (or victories) and come back with absolutely exceptional products in LCC5. I?ve seen a lot of talent that can be made twice as good if the contestants where to really put their minds to it.

Those are my few words, on to the reviews!

Entry 1
This was my hands down favorite. Despite the use of the over-used matrix music, the production overall was excellent and the choreography the best of the bunch. Starting out the first with no sabers was a great way to get me on your side and set a great theme of showing off your full range of skills. The flow and movement throughout the hallway those first 45 seconds was excellent. The kicking at 0:25 reminded me very much of the much longer sequence from ?Who am I?. I loved the use of groundwork, again, something not seen in many other films at all. Another great unorthodox portion was when your black character grabbed the tan characters? hair. At :50 I could feel that kick through the monitor; it was an expert transition from striking to sabers although I didn?t like the framing of that shot.
The saber portion itself was not as fast as it could have been but the tempo worked. The reason it worked was because the choreography used many elements that made it feel as if these two contestants where really out to kill each other. Now I?m not a fan of using hand and leg strikes in a duel with weapons but in the style you chose these strikes worked. What made them work well was that the way these strikes where included did not feel like they where just a substitute for the fact that the choreographers ?couldn?t? land a lightsaber strike. Instead, it felt like the fighters where using every opportunity to do damage to their opponent. Now there where a few instances of unrealistic waiting such as the jump at 1:16 and if you don?t know by now, that is one thing I really don?t like. However, the choreography more than made up for it in the strike selection. A good number of the strikes where targeted at the legs. Smart! The fighters would often go for a low blow then a high blow to try and confuse their oppone

 

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition. We learned a lot from this process, both from the comments and the other entries.
The reviews given by everyone will be very helpful for future projects as well. We look forwards to future videos from
everybody and are anxious to get started on a new one fairly soon.

I also wanted to make short list of the main people involved in the video since we didn't have credits in the submitted video.
Kenny Richstad - (KRichstad - Forum Name) - Brown Coat , Choreography, Editing
Tommy Hood - Guy in the Black Trench Coat, Choreography
Ken Brimfield - Camera
Peter Gaillard - (Centius) - Rotoscoping/Fx, Training Partner
We will release another version with full credits soon.

Again we just want to thank everyone who helped to run and entered this contest. We really enjoyed the whole process and look forward to seeing how far everyone can push themselves with these fight scenes. We also plan to start preparing for our next video in the near future so if anyone is interested in lending some help we would love to have your assistance on the project. The main areas we will need assistance in will most likely be rotoscoping and possibly sound, any other areas that someone may specialize in are welcome too. Just send me a pm if you are interested and I will be sure to keep in touch with you.

 

Centius, Congrats on a well deserved win!

In our entry, I was the one in the white uniform.
I've learned a lot about what I could have done better, and already working on something for next year. It'll even have a little bit of a story

 

the ones i really like are numbers 1, 8, 11, 12, 13. 1 gains points for hand-to-hand, and 8 loses points for excessive dogma



very nice sounds on number 3, though i can't say i like the whole kendo thing



question: why is it so hard for some people to hold a double-blade properly?

 

Thank you, neo. I always try to make the sounds sound right. For example, I gave the "master" more calm, muffled saber swings and ignition. I gave the "student" a more aggresive, youth like, proud swing and ignition.

I can't wait for the final version of Entry 1. I'm anxious to see if they changed anything.

 

good, lightsabre personalities.

 

It's not kendo, it's Aikido. (they execute some swordpractice aswell)

 

whatever. i was never too impressed by japanese styles. they're very rigid and.... efficient. more martial than art

 

Wootaun Hyamenus=double-blue
Naurm=green

and Robb Coleman (not a user name) was purple.

Congrats to Centius for comin' on top!

 

I'm glad someone decided to jump in and explain how the number of votes is calculated. Considering that the number is calculated as it's pulled out of the database, it's rather impossible for the number to be incorrect. And the explanation provided is exactly right.

Congratulations to Centius. I've been watching the voting all along, it was clear who was going to win by the 2nd day.

 

I do the same. I have two saber libraries; one is from the audio tutorial on TFN, and is more aggressive and harsh sounding. I usually use that one for myself, since I'm a Sith most of the time. This time I gave it to Ashley, but that was more because the other sound library has rain hits and boiling water in it, which i needed for my own saber. (Yes, I was the guy in Entry 4, and it was fun falling into the pool. Almost lost my glasses, though. I took them out of the pool and put them on the side, then had to digitally remove them from the last shot because they were in the frame.)

 

Me and TCF also used different sounds for each saber... ^_^

 

That's good. I also try to use the right clash everytime. It's easier for me with clashes because I have such a huge library of just clashes.

 

I hope you all enjoyed my reviews. Excellent work this competition and hopefully we can see next competition's entries learn from the mistakes and innovations we've seen this year to completely blow us away.

 

Thanks to all the people who liked our location (entry 15, billowy hill), I'm looking foreward to getting some good use out of it. I was thinking that I wasn't going to like this nevada desert thing, but its starting to grow on me. ^^^^^^^^ I'm the dude in the Jedi robe, and Oingo had a black trenchcoat and WAS chewing gum. Which I didn't notice 'til later. At which time I beat him over the head with a... Oh wait, that was part of his... um... character. Right. I finished rotoing the fight and it's up in my site, and in the boards. I think I forgot to post the link though. Whoops.

Bgii_2000

 

Oingo had a black trenchcoat and WAS chewing gum. Which I didn't notice 'til later. At which time I beat him over the head with a... Oh wait, that was part of his... um... character. Right.



-Spiff

 

Well, congrats to everyone. Here is a version of my entry that Draconis and a friend of his have modified, adding lightsaber effects and melting arm effects. To clear things up, the idea was supposed to be that he had a robotic arm made of sturdy, blaster -shielded metal, which wasn't quite strong enough to hold a lightsaber, but he wasn't going to quit without a fight. It was intended to be more dramatic, with him grabbing the blade and pulling the hero in, and just when he is about to disarm him with his bare hand, it blows out the back of his hand (his hand actually gets sliced in half, not off). Also, I planned to have the second half of the fight, against me with two sabers, down in a cave which the viewer would recognize as the cave where Luke is tested in ESB. The hero would almost kill the dark jedi down there, but at the last moment he would succumb to a sneaky volly of electricity from the villain's eyes. I was even under the illusion that I would have time to connect this to yoda. As the hero died, the dark jedi would cockily comment that no jedi could challenge him. But the hero calls out for Yoda with his last breath, and we see Yoda's face in a ship above dagobah, then the Dark jedi's eyes through the hole in the cave, and close with Yoda's ship racing down to the surface to meet his enemy. This, I believe, connects seamlessly with the extended universe story.

Anyway, we did have a rotoscoped version that I didn't end up using. Here it is, and note that the framerate problem is due to my poor management, since I gave Drac some footage that apparently needed de-interlacing or some such thing I don't understand (Spiff accurately observed that I don't know jack about post-production, and we had some communication problems. So here it is.

http://s54.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=2RJO8I0JE94JZ20XBV53RSKN5J

Note that there is a disproportionate amount of credits that have a lot of inside jokes between us, so it probably wont make sense.


Thank you all sincerely for this experience, but it was honestly way too draining for me to continue. I had fun dabbling in the star-wars fan-filmer lifestyle, But I have actually been really busy scrapping my life and job together after this, which required so much attention that I have been absent from this thread and didn't have enough time to view all entries and give a fair vote.

anyway, from unless I figure out some major life reorganizing, I think I will only be observing from the sidelines from here on out.

Thanks again guys! See you later.