Wednesday, 10 December 2014

Alarm



From South Korean studio Mesai, Alarm is a fantastically constructed CG 3D animation. Slightly long at just over eight minutes this short film pushes the limits of what CG animation is capable of with its precision for detail. Just from the initial camera shot you can tell that it's going to be more sophisticated than your average short animated feature.

There's three main thing's that make this short more sophisticated:

The camera shots, without fail every single shot in this animation has points on the thirds, either verticle and horizontal. This instantly make the piece look more professional. I also really like how at the start the depth of field is played around with to make it seem more dream like just before he's woken up, I also think it really emphasises the individually modelled objects and gives them there own focal point to be appreciated by the viewer. This is also how they show off the toaster and the gun a bit later in the short.

The immeasurable attention to detail on the modelling. For example the main one that blew my mind was the stereo. The thing is it hasn't just been textured to look that good, every detail has been carved and modelled, including the company name on the top left embossed into the stereo, and all the grooves on the dial which disappear when you zoom out, and don't even get me started on the mobile that too is fantastic. Even the toaster says Mesai on. Which is great but even more inspiring to me because they are such mundane objects with so many fiddly bits, it still would of worked without all the detail but makes his surroundings look more photorealistic.

The lighting at the start makes it quite dreamy and I think theres some really masterful lighting techniques used later on in this animation, to cause certain dials and buttons to have large amounts of reflection on them. And in particular on the phone and the gun at times there are perfect rays of sunlight which make them seem more powerful.

The key feature of this animation however that makes it overall successful is how the narrative is based upon something so simple, a boy getting up with an annoying alarm, yet it's made very effective by these key details. If there are any comments that I would make that would improve this piece, those are, at times this narrative is too long, and has some seriously long pauses. Especially when it all goes black that seems to stay black for a long time, I also think that the character could of done with more work to make him to the same standard as the other modelled components. I think he looks like a mainstream CG animation character and that puts me off. But I know to a lot of people they wouldn't agree, and of course this is me only being super nit picky, I think it's an amazing piece of work for two people to create, it's a shame that they haven't done anything since. Korea is mainly famous for inbetweens of the big shows, it'd be amazing to see some more things like this come out of that country.

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