The
dialogue between the world wise “Old Man” and
the math-whiz “Young Man” is sharp and humorous,
with a snap to it that you rarely see in suspense films.
With a healthy dose of profanity mixed in, the dialogue’s
tempo and content actually reminds me tremendously of the
dialogue between Randall and Dante in Clerks, with the Young
Man reminding me of Randall and the Old Man reminding me
of Dante. As the tight acting from the two main characters
shone through and the plot wove itself together, I found
that I was growing increasingly anxious to see how he would
finish the film. To my pleasure, the ending of the film
worked well, with a pleasing punch of unexpectedness to
it.
Visual
Look
The overall look of this film was quite impressive. While
we’ll break down the main portions of visual look
as we normally do, we’ll also look at character model
and animation due to the animated nature of the film.
Because
of the number of flashbacks in the Old Man’s tale,
there were plenty of places for Mr. Connell to use creative
cameras, and he really did. Whether it was to crane down
from Boston’s skyscrapers to the subway tunnel below,
dolly through a large crowd of people at a book signing,
or letting bodies fly past the camera in an explosion, he
got shots no microfilmmaker could hope to get in a live-action
film. He also used shallow depth of field quite well. (Although
there was scene, toward the end, in a bathroom in which
the out of focus person in the background looked very digitally
out of focus—a situation which causes fractal lines
rather than a true soft focus. This might be able to be
fixed with some of the new 3D Camera focus features in After
Effects 7.)
His
use of lighting was also quite good, with everything from
the classic prison lighting of a jail sequence, to the soft
lighting of a living room, to the overwhelming light of
a government experiment gone awry.
The
visual effects were strong and well set up, but a bit problematic
as well, because, like is so often the case, real visual
effects compositing software doesn’t look quite right
in a 3D animated world. This is a problem that the folks
who create the 3D cut-scenes for video games have been wrestling
with for years.
For
a one man operation, the animation and look of the characters
in this film was very solid. Throughout the film Mr. Connell
made use of newscasts playing in the background to jog the
memory of his protagonists. These were very well designed
and looked very nice. The overall look of the characters
and the complexity of their total animation were especially
impressive.
Obviously,
as I mentioned in the content section, the animation and
the clothing of the characters was a bit on the stiff side,
reminding me of some of the better animation done in machinema.
(Machinema animators hack the code found in 3D video games
and then create films using the 3D models.) The mouth movements
were also a little strange, with a feathery feel to them.
For future films, Mr. Connell might want to consider utilizing
Crazy Talk 4 (which we reviewed here) for mouth animation,
as it has a more concrete feel to many of the mouth movements.
