A homebrew animated short film has been garnering quite a bit of online attention lately. It’s title is 《打，打个大西瓜》or Hit, Hit a Big Watermelon. The story of how it was made was quite remarkable, but I won’t get into that because it’s already been covered in great detail at ESWN, ChinaSmack and ChinaHush (a.k.a. high profile blogs more popular than us).
Instead, I thought I’d call up my brother, a hotshot digital artist at Dreamworks Animation. He was on the team that created Kung Fu Panda and the recent Monsters vs. Aliens. After watching it, here’s what he had to say:
“The fact that this was done by one person is very very impressive. That being said, the visual quality and art direction are inconsistent (some things are much higher quality then the rest), the FX are pretty decent for the most part. The lighting seems to only use key lights, no fills or bounce lights, and the compositing is kinda weird. The models are too low res for alot of the close ups. The character animation and acting is actually really bad (lacking in alot of the 12 principles of animation such as ease in and ease out, overlapping action, line of action, etc.) The cinematography is not too good either, alot of confusing camera cuts. The use of Toon shading with semi realistic shading is also quite jarring.
Regardless of its shortcomings, the person who did this is obviously extraordinarily talented and obviously worked really hard on this. I’m more even more impressed by the fact that he had very limited resources to make this and from what it sounds like, he is self taught. This would explain why on a technical level, things are impressive, but on an artistic level, things need alot of work. It’s even common in portfolios here at major studios: TD have impressive tech demos but not art demos, artists have impressive art demos but not so impressive tech demos. The guy who made this fits into the first category. With proper artistic direction he could make some great things. It’s really unfortunate that someone with this much latent talent and drive won’t have the chance or money to go to school =( If he were to go to gobelens or supinfoco in France (perhaps the best in the world) or scad/rcad/calarts (best in the US, and RCAD is almost on par with the schools in France) in the us or vancouver film school, he would really be able to develop his skills and his eye.
The concept is also very cool. This person would make a good candidate for an FX artist.”
You and your criticism do not support Chinese animation industry!!!
thanks for the comment from an expert, your bother
加油! I like your blog
@Key
Thanks for the encouragement. You need to encourage Junde too, so that his lazy bum writes more.
I must also add though, that this still much better then a lot of the stuff that actually does come out of these fancy pants art schools. I look forward to seeing what else this guy will go on to do.