Vinia wrote:

Is Veil sporting a new do?

Remember this is in the real.

Honestly at first I didn't really think much of this, but now that I've seen the cinematic in its final stage, it's actually pretty decent. I miss the sound effects though, but this is still a hundred times better than just the one image we got every chapter.

That's pretty flippin' good, Rare, well done! I had to watch it a couple of times to catch everything, and I think some people might take a while to get used to your artistic style, but it's pretty groovy.

Not sure what Wright did, though. Did she warp a building to get inside it or something?

Anyway, it'd be grand with some music. And it still reminds me of Another World (Out of this World for you US sillies).

All good apart from the second merovingian angle where it looks like he has no eyes and the scene of Ghost hyper jumping.

Part from those, pretty sweet and look forward to seeing these evolve as time goes on.

Hmm, it was pretty good, but it could use more cow bell. Oh and YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY! Go Veil!

   That's pretty good for a first attempt.  Good job, Rarebit.

Wish I hadn't been spoiled by the thread title in General Discussion. Anyways, I loved that, and if that takes 3 weeks then 3 weeks should be spent :O

Bloooooooody good first attempt Rare! I was like omg omg omg let me jack in. And the new stuff aside from the wireframed stuff is aweeeeesome.

EDIT: Definately a good feeling to have our cinematics back!

odj wrote:

lol is it me or does the Merovingian in that pic look like President Abraham Lincoln?

Anyway good first attempt Rare, very good indeed. The Veil looked like a female Counterpart to the Joker in that Cinematic lol

Fen wrote:

MatrixRefugee wrote:

Ooh... who's that? New character or someone we know? Nice pic!!

Naturally, it's me.  Rarebit lost a bet with me, and now he has to make me into a storyline character.

I'm gonna take this moment, now that the cinematic is out, to laugh at you.

Haha, you look like a chick.

I gotta say, when I first saw it, I was initially disappointed. But the more I watch it, the more I like it. I really like the little combat bit with Veil and the jack.

I see Mathalos found the swf file. The actual page loaded in the cinematic view window is

http://thematrixonline.station.sony...cs/cin11_3.html

which will keep it at the right size and prevent it from automatically looping. You'll probably see an "unable to load" notice below the cinematic if you view that page in a browser other than IE--that's the fallback image you'd see in the in-game browser (which is just a fancy skin over your IE install, basically) if it wasn't able to load the cinematic for some reason.

GIF versions of the cinematic (broken down into the somewhat arbitrary chunks in which I worked on it):

Scene 1a
Scene 1b

Scene 2

Scene 3a
Scene 3b
Scene 3c
Scene 3d

Scene 4a
Scene 4b
Scene 4c

Scene 5

xenin wrote:

odj wrote:

lol is it me or does the Merovingian in that pic look like President Abraham Lincoln?

Anyway good first attempt Rare, very good indeed. The Veil looked like a female Counterpart to the Joker in that Cinematic lol

I always think "Ask Jeeves" when I see that particular shot of him.

You're right about the Joker thing--I think particularly in the two shots where her lips are mostly black. Probably hard to avoid *not* looking like the Joker if you've got a white face, black lips, and a wicked smile, I guess. I was thinking last night why I ended up drawing her lips darker there, and I guess it mostly had to do with wanting to make her face look heavily shadowed, and to make the smile stand out more. Black and white has a lot of choices to make when it comes to rendering mid-value surfaces.

I thought these wicked smiles were a little more successful, though:

My only beef is that it actually went TOO fast.  Since there was no voice acting, I had to take time to read the subtitles which would distract me from watching the action, or vise versa.  For next time, I'd suggest slowing down the pace a bit to allow more time for reading, especially for the slow readers, and especially since you can't rewind it without having to watch the whole thing again.

But other than that, really great job!  The outcome was a lot better than I thought it would be!  :)

Cervacius wrote:

My only beef is that it actually went TOO fast.

Yeah, that's what I meant last night about "pacing." It took me a while for instance to figure out that all but the shortest subtitles have to be visible for at least 2-3 seconds in order to be legible; in my planning for the animation, I'd thought I could get away with 1 second clips--which is a good speed for action scenes (even 1/2 second clips for some of the Veil shots), but not long enough to handle a subtitle, as it turns out. That was the main thing that bit me in the first scene (Merv & General). That scene wouldn't have been easy to slow down because of the flickering light...so you probably won't see me trying to have another scene with a constantly animating environment on top of a lot of dialogue. The environment is a factor because it means I can't simply freeze a frame of dialogue for a second or a split second to give it more time to be read (as opposed to, say, the computer messages in the last scene), since the background would stop animating and it would look jarring. That means I'd have to multiply the frame count every time I needed more...time in that type of shot, and especially as I was starting animating the art, I was sort of paranoid about going over my frame limit.

I did come pretty close to maxing out what I was able to work with, so I guess the first scene ended up taking one for the team. Pacing will always be an issue when longer animation = larger file size. It's tricky, and definitely the main thing I'll have to focus on improving. I have to find ways to slip in pauses for dialogue (the dialogue that I absolutely have to have, at least--there actually isn't much dialogue in this cinematic) while avoiding ending up with a boring succession of non-animating talking heads, which was a major concern of mine going in.

My original rough outline called for 900 frames. The final frame count is 1297.