Our FanFilm on the net....kind of!!

For those who know me and Ant (darth_dom) fairly well, you will know that in the past we have ventured in the fanfilm market. Our prolific career has seen the creation of 3 films to-date, with our finest achievement being The Darkened Force which was exclusively premiered at the Jedi-Con 2004 show in Germany.

The frustrating part is that we don't have the technical know-how or finance to put them on the web. However, thanks to youtube, Ant has put the space battle which features in The Darkened Force for your viewing pleasure onto his youtube page. This has very much opened the doors for us to express and show our creative powers, and we hope to put more tantalizing clips of our films on youtube in the near future.

So, here it is in all its glory:
TDF Space Battle

I have also made two Lego short films which I do intend to upload on my personal youtube page very soon (once I've created one that is)

Enjoy!!

 

Well, as a film-maker myself I will give both positive and negative opinions.

Positive - absolutely brilliant. The CGI was really good, and some good dynamic camera moves.

But there were a few issues. First is lack of music. In some cases, a lack of music can work really well (for example, the Obi Darth duel in ANH), but it didn't work here.

Also there was a shot with little motion stuck in a high-motion sequence (at 0:26) - seemed a little out of place

The cut at 0:16 could be at least a second shorter

And there was a lot of focus on close ups of blasters firing and small explosions. Seemed out of place for a SW film - more in line with Star Trek or Babylon 5 (although your CGI was better than those)

Don't take this personally. It was a very very good scene, and I look forward to the film. Just offering some personal advice

 

Sweet. Thats pretty high quality stuff. How long did it take to render?

 

Very nice indeed. I wasn't expecting that at all. Did you model those ships yourselves? I didn't recognise them from anything. And music would have done it good, but really well done overall.

 

Impressive. Will be nice to see the entire movie one day.

 

Matt and Ant - well done indeed! I LOVE the design of the ships SO SWEET!!! Can't wait to see the entire film!

 

Thanks for the comments so far, it's really good to finally show some of our film on the net

Mark, thanks for the input. Knowing where you come from (by that I mean Backyard Productions, a.k.a fellow fanfilm makers) it means a lot that you like it. I should perhaps put this sequence in context as it may explain a few things; This is the finale segment of the space fight, before this segment was another (with some even better animation scenes imo) and that did have a musical score, although we went for a moody Thomas Newman piece. Also, just after the final shot of this clip, we cut to the finale sabre fight segment which is soundtrack only (no SFX, even the sabres). So we got a fine balance of music & SFX and so that's why we opted for no music during this sequence. Bascially we didn't want to make a fanfilm in the mould of the Star Wars films because we wanted to do our own thing.

Ant was solely responsible for the animations too. I just helped storyboard and direct them, and we had a really tight deadline to get the film complete for Jedi-Con, so we had to take into account all these factors when doing the animation. We also had zero budget, one PC for animating and rendering (which took forever) and in the end the film was just a bit of fun. All things considered I think Ant did a brilliant job. I can certainly see your points though, and if we had the time and resources, I'm sure we'd have really perfected things as much as poss

We designed all the ships ourselves (apart from the Jedi Starfighter), and Ant modeled and textured them himself too.

We'd really like to put the whole thing onto youtube, although at times our lack of budget does really show, plus the story is a tricky one to follow, with some surreal secenes going on (my fault for being too over-indulgent ). I will be seeing Ant tomorrow and we'll see about getting the whole thing up in 3-4 parts.

Meanwhile I aim to put up a trailer for our other fanfilm, Dice , this coming week

 

How big is the film when compressed for the web? I dont mind hosting the film from my site for a while as Im sure we would all like to see it.

 

Not sure Matt, the whole thing exists on Ant's PC and I don't know how far we can go with the compression using the software from the editing programme. I'll speak to him about it today if we manage to meet. But huge thanks for the hosting offer

 

Here's a small trailer for our other Star Wars fanfilm, Dice :
Dice trailer

This film was made way back in 2001 and made in about 8 weeks. It was just a quick fix while we still worked away on The Darkened Force, and I under took most of the visual effects and editing myself. The film was set on Earth and saw two Jedi seek and destory an evil Bounty Hunter called Kray-Fin. 'How the heck did we arrive on Earth??', I hear you cry!! Well, it's quite simple(ish). A strange world in the SW galaxy known as planet Dice was smothered in all sorts of gases and electrical activity. It's unknown, and presumed dangerous, consistency led to the Republic making it a 'no go zone', but this also meant it was the perfect hiding place for those wishing not to be found. Our Jedis were forced to act, and the electrical output of their ligthsabres reacted with Dice's atmosphere, sending them through a vortex which happened to land them on Earth!

....in other words we wanted to make a SW film which didn't require loads of fancy costumes and visual effects

The film wasn't too bad, but again a bit too over-indulgent and so I doubt I'll bother putting it on the web (not in full anyway).

 

Get some nice shots of you in there hehe And Ant

 

If you want a downloadable version uped. Contact me. I recently got my hands on 20GB of webspace with 750gb of bandwidth a month with ell-the-ewok.com... for $10 a year...

 

Hello all, cheers for the kind comments! Very much appreciated.

I agree with you on those Points Mark, I've no idea why that shot lasts so long... it probably made sense at the time, lol.

I'll see how small I can get the film compressed to, but I'm not that knowledgable about this sort of thing at all... The film isn't actually on my HD any more (it was taking up too much space) it is however on various DVDs and CDs in a box in my cupboard!

Thanks again folks!

 

Sorry I haven't chipped in here yet!

Visually this is quite stunning, I am truly amazed. Well done both of you
Both very talented people

I'd agree music wise tho - I think a more powerful, resounding track would make it more emotional, in the Star Wars style. I am thinking opening sequence of ROTS, one of the best scenes of a SW movie ever. But as this is a small bit, hard to judge it tbh.

But I love it
If we can get a laptop for Manchester G-Mex, maybe we can get a copy of that running?

 

all this... and he's young and good looking,too!