The Dark Descent - Animated Short Film

[Juke]

Hello all.

The past two weeks I've been working on my first ever animation. The initial idea was to make something Amnesia related on account of Traggey's little giveaway contest and I'd already drawn background art for my channel featuring the main character and a grunt peeking from behind him. So I started expanding this into small animation, making him look around and walk. I meant the video to be quite short (even though it's not that long even now) but as I went along I kept stumbling on new ways to depict certain aspects of the Amnesia world and started adding more and more.

So here it is in a nutshell the first ever Amnesia: The Dark Descent animation... made by me. I can't take full credit however since every bit of audio you hear is from the actual game so I owe everything to Frictional Games for the ambience created. Needless to say it wouldn't be half as good without it.

[video=youtube]http://youtu.be/FUiNyaInc6g[/video]

[xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Hey,

first of all, I think thats a really nice idea for the contest and one can tell you already put a lot of work into this.
If I may give some constructive feedback, I'd say that it isn't too short, quite the opposite in fact. I think it actually might be even better if you shortened it a bit (I know, if one works directly on something like that it always appears to be shorter than it really is, because you have already seen it over and over and know it by heart ) and then tried to make the shortened scenes a bit more interesting and diverse.

For example it feels like there's a bit too much walking right now where not much happens. Maybe you could spice that up with some extra frames of animation, like the character looking nervously over his shoulder or the light of the lantern flickering. (I really like that little moment at 3:18 where he looks to the side, its timed pretty well.)
I think you could also improve the illusion of him moving forward - for example have some pillars or similar pieces of environment move past him in the darkness or have the lantern light the floor under his feet, which scrolls in the opposite direction of him.

I also think it could be very atmospheric, if his lantern would flicker and become dimmer at the end when the grunt approaches... or if the camera would zoom out more, heightening the sense of that dude being really small and alone. o.O

Keep up the good work

[Juke]

Really good points you make.

It really does make one jaded when they've put hours and hours on the same thing. In the end I just perfected the scenes I had and left it at that but I may come back to it with the improvements you mentioned once I feel refreshed and enthused again.

I had thought of putting pillars and such to colour the long walks. The reason they're so long in the first place is that I didn't want it to feel like it jumped too quickly from the Shadow to the Grunt.

During the ending scene the light was meant to diminish over time but there are some limitations in the program I used so I didn't pull it off very well. Flickering would be cool though, once I figure out how best to depict it.

[bingo296]

Hello all.

The past two weeks I've been working on my first ever animation. The initial idea was to make something Amnesia related on account of Traggey's little giveaway contest and I'd already drawn background art for my channel featuring the main character and a grunt peeking from behind him. So I started expanding this into small animation, making him look around and walk. I meant the video to be quite short (even though it's not that long even now) but as I went along I kept stumbling on new ways to depict certain aspects of the Amnesia world and started adding more and more.

So here it is in a nutshell the first ever Amnesia: The Dark Descent animation.. . made by me. I can't take full credit however since every bit of audio you hear is from the actual game so I owe everything to Frictional Games for the ambience created. Needless to say it wouldn't be half as good without it.

[video=youtube]http://youtu.be/FUiNyaInc6g[/video]

Nice video. Good job on making such this good video.

[Paddy™]

Damn, great work! I think you captured the spirit of the game really well; most of it is about atmosphere and anticipation, which you nailed. Sparing use of monsters along with the soundtrack and the minimalist visuals were all good choices.

What did you use to make the animation? I've always wanted to give this sort of thing a try but the learning curve of most animation software is pretty daunting.

[MaZiCUT]

To be honest with you, in no offense what so ever because i know animating is hard: this is boring and i couldn't watch through it all. But it's still nice.

[Hunter of Shadows]

To be honest with you, in no offense what so ever because i know animating is hard: this is boring and i couldn't watch through it all. But it's still nice.

I'm with Gregsworth on this, I mean seriously no offense, a very good job...but fairly dull, I'd suggest finding a way to make it more interesting.

Other then that very good

[Clord]

I disagree with the two dudes above. Making it more visual and less abstract would ruin it.

[Juke]

I'm not offended at all. Like I said it's my first animation I've ever done and I cheated a lot by making it against a black screen. There are a lot of flaws in there that you can't see because it's so dark.

I also don't have a proper program that would work well with animation. I simply dropped all my drawn frames into VideoPad which is a basic video editor somewhere between Windows Movie Maker and Sony Vegas. One of my biggest issues with it was the low quality preview which meant I often had to render the whole video just to see what a single scene would look like. So as the project went on the duration it took would eventually reach 30 minutes and then more often than not I had to redo the scene after taking a proper look.

This is the reason I went for something very basic and didn't try to over do it because the tools and experience I had were too limited for any high quality stuff.

I'm glad there are those who like it and I don't condemn those who do not. I'm just happy I managed to pull off something like this because I'd never tried before. Who knows, maybe I will raise the bar someday.

[CrazyShootin]

I like how you used the music and sounds to create the atmosphere, reminds me of the first time I played this game