===== From Markus.Altendorff@asamnet.de: Good: A very nice, "cartoony" animation - the topping ladder is my favourite scene. + Facial animation + Unexpected ending is well done. Improvable/suggestions/nitpickings ;-) - Some of the walking motions are "slippery" (running to the bomb, for example) - Smoke of the bomb looks odd - more like a dust tornado ;-) - dragging the ladder out of the bag: i'd suggest to drop the scaling and just let it rise "through the floor", i.e. he just pulls more and more of it out of his bag? - maybe some more sparks that don't fly so far, but stay closer to the fuses? These are just minor shortcomings, of course. It's an excellent job. ===== From maal-irtc20030115@anthrosphinx.de: Good: A very nice, "cartoony" animation - the topping ladder is my favourite scene. + Facial animation + Unexpected ending is well done. Improvable/suggestions/nitpickings ;-) - Some of the walking motions are "slippery" (running to the bomb, for example) - Smoke of the bomb looks odd - more like a dust tornado ;-) - dragging the ladder out of the bag: i'd suggest to drop the scaling and just let it rise "through the floor", i.e. he just pulls more and more of it out of his bag? - maybe some more sparks that don't fly so far, but stay closer to the fuses? These are just minor shortcomings, of course. It's an excellent job. ===== From evilsnack@hotmail.com: I've seen the comic in Mad magazine, and I know their eyes aren't like this. Using their eyebrows to achieve the same effect of expression would have been better. ===== From jminner@sc.rr.com: Spy Vs Spy rocks. I really liked this animation, till the end. ===== From zach@brewstergeisz.cjb.net: Beautiful! This is such an ambitious and solid animation that I'm going to give you a lot of crit. 1. Interpenetration in the first shot of the white spy: his belly pokes through his coat. 2. The appearance of the ladder was really odd, and would have been better had it simply translated up through the bag, rather than scaling; I can appreciate how tough this would be with compositing, though. 3. The whole thing could use some tightening up in parts; his reaction to both the first and second bombs could be much quicker. 4. Might have been funny if the little spies had a more bouncy walk as they escaped, to emphasize just how small they are, like they're just little particles. That would just be icing on the cake though. Excellent job. (Good trick in using negative lighting to fake shadows; I'll have to steal that!) Sergio Arognes (the creator of Spy vs. Spy in Mad Magazine) would approve. :) ===== From s.mitchell@tue.nl: Won't play with gtv. I especially liked the bit where the hat slid down the ladder. ===== From thatsalloneword@msn.com: A little drawn-out, but good. Some bits really seem to drag on. ===== From irtc_mail@yahoo.co.uk: There is a very strange perspective effect on the opening camera move away from the window. I guess this is from a wide angle camera inside the room. Perhaps it would be better with a longer focal length camera which is outside the room and can see through the walls. why isn't he asleep on the bed? His fingers go through his stomach as he wakes up. When he wakes up, it seems his eyes look at the bomb but not his head. I would expect him to turn towards the bomb. The smoke from the fuse rises up too fast. The camera pulling on the close-up of the bomb seems to stop too suddenly, and the strange perspective appears again with the join between the walls sloping off to the left. The run over to the bomb looks a bit floaty, like running on the moon. I am not sure about the sliding to a stop pose, with palms facing forwards and legs side-by-side. If you were trying to balance while sliding to a stop, you would try to turn sideways-on to the slide so you had one leg in front and the other behind. This pose turns up quite a few times, perhaps some variation is needed. The way the bomb is being 'held' in one hand looks wrong. His hands are too small to wrap around it, so the bomb is just positioned against his hand like its stuck with glue. Perhaps if he held it with one hand below and one above while running he could then hold it from below with one hand if needed. Trying to push the bomb through the bars definately needs a metallic clang sound effect. When he tries to get through the bars, his hat is knocked off, but when he goes for the bag, its back on again. I don't like the way everything suddenly goes blurred when he opens the bag. The head movement as he is rejecting tools isn't very clear. It looks more like tilting than shaking from side to side. The way the steps magically grows in size seems to weaken the joke. I think it would be better to see the full size steps just being pulled out. The camera is in the same place in the cell for the whole of the beginning. A shot from the corridor looking in through the bars as he is trying to squeeze through them and a shot from outside the window looking in through the window bars as he climbs up the steps would create some variation. After he knocks the steps up in the air they seem to fall down too quickly. After the steps land on him there is no time for him to have got out from under them before we see him again running across the cell. When he is looking at the saw he needs to move his head round as well as his eyes. You might move just your eyes to scan the horizon, but the closer something gets, the more your head moves when you scan it. His left arm and hand are noticeably frozen while he is coming up with the idea of cutting the fuse. Again, he his 'holding' the bomb with one hand against the side while cutting the fuse. This hand ought to be underneath. As he spots the second bomb, his eyes seem to come out through his face rather than the sockets widening. The way he holds the 'bye' sign with his thumb not wrapped around it looks wrong, and everything except the sign is frozen. I wonder if the bye sign should be here at all. It isn't necessary and he hasn't acknowledged the existence of the audience before now, even though there are moments when this could happen, like when he first realises there is a bomb in the cell and when he has the fuse cutting revelation. The edit after the explosion is jarring because it switches between two cameras with only slightly different views of the same scene. The little spies seem to be moving along faster than they are walking, like they are on roller skates. There seems to be an extra bit at the end where the music fades back in for a moment. As for the spy modelling, as I was watching, I kept noticing that his fingers are all the same length. This draws attention to them, even when they are not moving. His mouth appears once when he is on the bench, but is covered most of time. It would be better not to have it at all. There is a lot of movement of his forehead throughout this but rather than being expressive, it just draws attention to the fact that he doesn't have any eybrows. The sound effect for the burning fuse is much too violent. It sounds like a raging inferno. It needs to be more like a soft hissing sound. Don't take these comments the wrong way. They are just suggestions, not a list of things I hate about it. This is my favourite for this round. The only thing I really didn't like was the extremely annoying music which goes na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na-na-na na-na-na-na, na-na-na-na in an endless loop. There is also a musical collision when the hallellula kicks in because its comes across as music-on-music, instantly sending both pieces out of tune. ===== From file: very cute. very nice facial expressions. would've liked it better if the ladder would be just pulled out instead of 'grown' out of the bag. I thought it was funny when he found the scissors and the saw and threw them away, but less funny when he actually used them Notable for composition, lighting