Hollow - Animation Film

Artwork
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My first animation film using Synfig

Hollow

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Oh-ho, an 11-minute film made in Synfig? Nice to see someone’s trying to use it for story telling with characters and stuff. I definitely see the effort.

How does Synfig handles? Did you experience any crashes, slow downs, etc.?

P.S. Do you want to hear some critique on what can be improved in the film?

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Thank you so much! Yes, critiques are very welcome.
Oh I’ll definitely continue to use it for storytelling for sure and yes, It wasn’t the easiest to animate on. Synfig can be laggy so you have to render a scene if you need a smooth preview.

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OK, here’s what I think can be improved:

  1. The most important thing - emotions. During the film characters don’t emote that much and you want that in a horror-like film like yours. Straight up, the scene at 0:42 when there’s a knock on the door, the only reaction Evelyn has is to just open a mouth a little. I don’t think I even saw anyone blink. Even crying at 4:30 is the same emotion, the same eye expression, just with tears.

The same at 9:14 when the man gets grabbed by those blood tentacles. You could potentially make his eye pupils diminish, eyebrows raised, some wrinkles appear, some shaking, you know. It’s of course hard to keep that level of details throughout the film, especially if you’re doing it alone, but the message is, you might want to push yourself a little when animating a high stake/culminating scenes.

  1. Extensive use of cut-out. Notice the lack of 3D movement in your film. Characters don’t turn their heads/limbs, it lacks certain depth. Again, it’s hard to do this sort of thing for the whole movie, but you want that sometimes to make your work feel more believable.

  2. Anatomy is a bit off. For example, look at this shot:

    Evelyn
    Evelyn500Ă—587 171 KB

Evelyn’s arms are too thin for the body. Looks quite weird. The palm and fingers are also too small. Although, it does have a creepy vibe, so kinda works I guess :slight_smile:

  1. Pacing. There are a lot those long shots/transitions, it’s basically cut->zoom in, cut->zoom in, cut->zoom out. I understand that it’s supposed to build tension, but I think you overused it. Often those zoom ins don’t have any purpose and a simple cut would have worked better, I believe.

Hopefully, my critique gave you some ideas. I am an amateur myself, so take everything with a mountain of salt. Anyway, I wish you luck, you threw yourself in a very hard genre - horror. It’s very unforgiving, some minor mistake and you will lose all that tension you were so meticulously building.

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Cool video! Congrats for your idea, effort and accomplishment :smiley:

One thing you can improve is shadowing. Some looks strange to me, like the chin and neck in the picture above, as well as the box corners.

Keep up the good work, improve it and… post your complains about Synfig so we can try to improve it too :wink:

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