===== From gregj56590@aol.com: Short description of personal interest increased Concept score. Thanks for info on AVI to MPG. ===== From agage@mines.edu: I like the idea. The falling domino effect is a good choice for this round, and the obligatory reference to POVray is almost expected. There are a few observations I'd like to make: The use of DTA to average the frames actually gives some motion blur. This may have helped things more than it hurt. I noticed that the dominos do have different numbers of dots -- good thing. My favorite part of this whole animation is right on the 15 second mark (not sure how many frames or the framerate, but I'll guess frame 450). This is where the light has a highly specular interaction with the dominos, and you get the impression of an advancing wave in all directions. If you could have made this kind of effect for more of the animation, it might have been more visually pleasing. The rest of the time, between the MPEG quality and the distance, it is hard to see what is happening. The ground could perhaps have used some texture, as well. It bothers me how many people have trouble creating MPEGs with enough compression to fit anything less than 1500 frames under the 3MB limit. I think I may start offering entrants time on one of my Linux machines to do the final encode... ===== From Martin.Magnusson.7121@student.uu.se: You could have used Cpmeg alone to get a compact MPEG file, there are a few compression options to play with that are described in the docs. ===== From chrisj@digiquill.com: I wish you could have had some different camera angles. I can hardly see at all the dominos falling in the rectangular field. ===== From quinet@gamers.org: Nice and simple. The placement of the camera could be improved a bit: at the beginning, you could wait until the dominoes start falling before following them. And when the dominoes in the big rectangle start falling, it would be better to stop the camera for a few seconds in a position that has the light source reflected on top of the falling dominoes (you see this effect briefly when the camera turns and this helps to see where the dominoes are falling). ===== From bill@apocalypse.org: Great concept. Yes, more time working on this, adding more detail and such would have helped, ah well. I would have liked a closer camera angle, seeing the dominos fall up close would have been more appealing. ===== From arcana@sinbad.net: Nice anim. :{) I would have liked it if the camera had moved slower and lower to the tops of the dominos. Keep a bit of mystery over what the dominos would spell when they finished toppling. ===== From r@159.134.245.19: A very nice idea, only it is a pitty dominos are so numerous and so small, I thing this would have made a much better animation if there had been less dominos and a closer look at them. As it is you can barely see the tree in the forest. Notable for composition ===== From r@dial-up40.webbernet.net: You have a story and action that goes somewhere and for that I salute you. Some of your technical decisions, however, badly damage the esthetic value of your anim. First, I think it likely that you could have gotten sufficient compression without the weird ghostly artifacts around the dominos just by changing the cmpeg control file. The roundabout method you used cost you resolution at every step and that, combined with the frequent excessively long shots, made it very difficult to actually see much of the action. This comment by clem@dhol.com.