SLOCUM at sea with himself LAUNCHED

[2dbert]

hey Paul,
I went to the site as soon as I saw this, but there's one image and it says "coming soon". Is that the way it's supposed to be?

[Paul Fierlinger]

After almost six years of production
Sandra and I have reached our online live date:
TODAY

http://slocumfilm.com/

[Paul Fierlinger]

Sorry, we seem to be still experiencing launch difficulties. I'm told now by our webmaster that he hasn't pulled the release trigger. It should be done within minutes!

[D.T. Nethery]

Congratulations ! Looking forward to seeing it.

I'm sharing this wherever I can. Best wishes for a successful launch !

[Paul Fierlinger]

Thanks David. Your attitude shows you know what it's all going to be about for us starting right now. We will be launching a vigorous advertising campaign targeting boat owners everywhere; mostly sailing blogs and print media with ads. Thanks,

[Cardin]

Purchased!!! I only had time to watch a small portion of it but I'm very pleased so far. The settings and art style make for a very captivating piece of entertainment and the music blends everything together. That Shay Lynch is quite a talent. I have no doubt the rest of the production will continue to inspire me.

This is quite refreshing, God knows I need a break from all the anime I watch Money well spent .

[CartoonMonkey]

Gorgeous Paul! Congratulations you two!

[artfx]

I saw the new site. Great work Paul!

Artists need to take notice.  Slocum: At Sea With Himself is real 2D, hand drawn, animation featuring brilliant animation, lushly painted backgrounds and inspiring music. It tells the story of Joshua Slocum, who made a one man sailing voyage around the world.

Even more astounding, for us independents out there, is how it is being released. Currently, it is available from Vimeo on Demand  with Amazon and iTunes service soon to follow. This is the coup we have all been waiting for folks. I will definitely be keeping my eye on this one!.

in my excitem.ent, I made a video blog about it!

http://studioartfx.com/IndieLife/paul-f ... es-slocum/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

We are seeing the future for all of us! Congratulations on an amazing accomplishment Paul!

[furushil]

Wow! Making your own film is a great achievement! I must admit I'm quite surprised at the low quality of the animation. I'm not trying to be rude but based on how you criticize most people in this forum I was expecting a better knowledge of the basic animation principles. I have nothing against breaking the rules but I think it should at least be convincing. I've seen you lecturing others about timing and spacing but you seem to ignore them completely. Congratulations!

[Paul Fierlinger]

I don't mind being critiqued; on the contrary, I find it always helpful and am open to learning new things about my work which only another person can spot. So would you please point out a few areas you find that show my lack of animation skills? For instance which particular scene and which point of a certain action is handled unskillfully by me. That should be more helpful than a simple blanket condemnation.

[mox]

Congratulations Paul & Sandra!
Looking forward to watch it.

[furushil]

I don't mind being critiqued; on the contrary, I find it always helpful and am open to learning new things about my work which only another person can spot. So would you please point out a few areas you find that show my lack of animation skills? For instance which particular scene and which point of a certain action is handled unskillfully by me. That should be more helpful than a simple blanket condemnation.

I am not sure if you just want to see weather I can backup my first comment or if you are really open to critiques. It is difficult for me to understand you as a person through the internet anyways.

I can only judge by the teasers on the website. The problem is that all your drawings are floating around in space without any weight or control. Your animation is obviously supposed to be realistic and subtile but nothing in real life is moving the way you are animating it. You are making it to unnecessarily complicated and unreadable.

The man for example who is eating the sandwich is moving in the most bizarre, unreadable and over complicated way and I honestly cannot imagine to watch a whole movie with this kind of movement. Why is he not just simply laying it down on the table? Why does he have to twist and turn it in the most unreadable way as if he is making some kind of dance with the sandwich. I am guessing the policeman is supposed to be a bad guy but he is not convincing and it is not understandable if he is supposed to be devouring the sandwich like a fat pig or if he is just clumsy. In the meantime the other guy seems to be paralyzed which does not really build up a tension. Basically I am not sure what is going on.
The main problem is that you have no control over your timing and spacing or you simply don’t care about it. If something is supposed in to move from A to B then why does it move on a zig-zag path or back and forth.

In the past you criticized people about how they do an inbetween and you often stated "just draw the damn thing and go to the next one". The problem is that if you do that, you get an uncontroled result which is really hard to watch.

I myself like classical animation but I am not trying to convince anyone to animate in any particular way. Any type of animation can be interesting as long as it is believable and tells a story.

I have a feeling that the characters in the teasers all seem to move in the same fashion, no matter who they are or how they look like.
The fact that there is no dialog makes them look more like puppets without much expression.
For example If the movie is about sailing one could emphasize the movement of the waves in the characters through the rhythm with more control and still maintain their personalities. It would be nice to make it more obvious so that a simple viewer could pick up on that and enjoy it.

The composition of the scenes and the style of the drawings are very interesting but watching them move makes me feel like I am listening to a scratched record.

I was mostly curious to see these teasers after reading so many of your comments and critiques and was expecting better decisions from someone with this much theoretical knowledge.
No matter what we do or our level of experience we are all animators here, striving to produce better work and I think we should stay humble while doing so.

[Paul Fierlinger]

You were first of all already itching for a fight before you even got a glimpse of this film because your anger towards me had been by now deeply seated, for which I have some sympathy. I do admit that at a few points over the years I had slipped into the style of critiques that I had to put up with over half a century ago from two of my best art professors. After all, Czechoslovakia in the 50’s in many ways was in heart and soul still living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. But mind you, those two professors prepared me well for surviving the rest of my life as a freelance artist.
You may have noticed I toned down my rhetoric a long time ago; I bet you will have difficulty recalling when I last expressed my opinions too indelicately for the 21st century. I actually gave up critiques all together; have you noticed? Keep in mind that I also liked many films here and have said so and explained the reasons for feeling that way, but by then you likely had already made up your mind about who I am and were blind to such posts.
So I am not going to dwell too long on defending myself; if you want to beat a dog you will always find a stick, which was the teaser you went for. Every teaser is there for a reason and this one we selected because most of our target audience, sailing people world over, know the Slocum book inside and out but most likely have never heard of him landing in jail. This scene should pique their curiosity. So the teaser wasn’t picked to show off any animation acrobatics but you don’t know enough yet to not use such harsh words(it happens to all of us). The huge sandwich known as a hoagie (the name is derived from the other word for pig) is famous for the Philadelphia area and the entire country makes fun of itself of how it is impossible to eat such a beast without looking like a pig. My Philadelphians will understand me. I used the vehicle to geographically place the set and setting. The cop does not represent a bad man, as you assume and now take a look into the slideshow called CAPTAIN where you will find many period photographs of Slocum and should recognize that very tight, wrapped into himself pose. When he wasn’t operating his boat he turned into a stuffed dummy of himself. He had only two states of mind; the wild, wound up toy, and the expended, runned down toy. You will see this throughout the film if you ever care to watch it. So I do pay attention to developing my characters into real people. Slocum is by then famous and the cop is showing his kindness and respect towards the famous sailor’s achievements and Slocum thanks him for it.
But look at any of the other teasers and show me where my characters lack weight and just float around. Don’t tell me how a man in heavy seas behaves – you get thrown about like a rabbit in a sack; it can be an excruciating experience and my fellow sailors have already taken notice. We released the film so far only in two places; Sandra’s FB and right here – nowhere else. Our Vimeo stats show 2,093 Plays, 14.7K Loads, and a bounce average of 1.02%, which says that the other 99% of viewers have stayed with the website for a decent length of time. The film has already been written up in one German sailing blog (thank you slowtiger) and the number of hits in Germany jumped from one day to the next so high that it surpassed all of the US: 6018 total loads and 1163 total plays. This is the obvious result of that one little story in one blog. A film made with the lack of skills and understanding of how real people act the way you have evaluated it could have never attracted such strong numbers.
Which leads me to my closing thought: when I used to criticize young animators so strictly, I always spoke with only my best intentions in mind as an adviser of how to make a living as a freelancer with 2D animation and that’s why you kept hearing me talk about timing and capturing real life and drawing with flare instead of following a century old set of formulas. And since you came here to see if I can prove doing myself what I’ve been preaching others and you can see for yourself that I have numbers now to prove that I can – numbers piled up in just 7 days before we have even gotten to placing any ads – just by word of mouth. BTW, the word has spread according to the Vimeo map across all continents and most countries in the world, including 29 hits in Uzbekistan and even one in Afghanistan.

[furushil]

I never meant to start a fight with you and I have no idea why you think that I am angry.
Why should I be angry? We have never even commented on each other’s work before. As I already said, I was curious about your animation.
You said you don’t mind being critiqued so I went ahead.
I didn’t mean to be harsh.

You can think that I am just young or unexperienced but the fact is that the movement in your animation is very confusing. It would be easy to fix it if you could just make proper inbetweens and leave out all the jazz that is going on between your keys. If you want to reach a mass audience then the action should be clear to anyone, even to people who don’t know what a hoagie is. It might be hard to eat but it shouldn’t be that difficult to place it on the table and that’s where the animation is the most confusing.

I am only interested in the animation itself and I don’t think it should be necessary to know the story behind the film. It would be nice if the film would also be understandable to people like me, who never read the book. Perhaps it would even make them want to read it afterwards. To me, a film should stand for itself and be an independent work of art.

The statistics and numbers that you present don’t affect the way it’s been animated. I am just judging by the animation here from an animators point of view.

Below is a screenshot of one of your scenes where the projectile gets fired. I marked the spacing of the projectile with a red dot. First of all the projectile should get a lot smaller in the distance and also the space between the drawings should get shorter as time progresses to achieve a realistic natural movement. I don’t understand why your spacing is so chaotic here. It looks like the drawings are almost evenly spaced but that is not how it is in real life. You might say that that’s an unimportant detail, but I think it should not happen to an experienced animator like yourself.

[slowtiger]

furushil, frankly you get on my nerves now. I've met you in person once, I've seen some of your work. From this I guess you're a perfectionist, you're quite good in your line of work. But you don't seem to realise that there's more than one stye of animation and more than just one set of rules. Each artist has to choose and decide which animation style to use, and it's no one's business to tell the others their style is "wrong".

If you reach out that far to accuse Paul of not knowing basic animation principles, you might as well deny Paul Driessen or Norman MacLaren were animators. Or Jan Lenica. Or any of the large army of animators not working for Disney, or one of your game companies. At the very least you should show some respect to someone who has finished a long film. Paul's style is no less "legit" than any other, and it suits the story.

Please widen your horizon and find some understanding.