Thanks for the feedback, guys I appreciate the honesty. The battlestar galactica comments were spot on because those camera zoom in effects were inspired by that show. After putting everything together and watching it through I even agree with you about the story and the voice cast, let me just explain a few things.
1. The story, Yes after watching it, I myself see the plot holes and general problems, however the story was actually a very quickly improvised, without time to sit back and look at the bigger picture. The reason for this is because I never intended this project to become as big as it eventually turned out. I was in fact only doing some test renders of a bunch of ships slowly floating past each other. The very first test renders are what appears in the opening credits (The 3 battleships with the fighter that flies into the hanger right at the start of the film) The video was only supposed to be 2 minutes of big ships floating past the camera and nothing more.
Then for the fun of it I knocked up a fake trailer using currently rendered footage & uploaded it to youtube. Before I knew it, that trailer gained a LOT of internet attention, I had people emailing me left right and centre asking for more. At this point I still had no real story or even a voice cast to proceed. Then by chance I manage to come across a couple of forums that did voice acting for paid/non paid productions. I posted the original trailer (Its on here somewhere) and before I knew it I had people throwing their youtube audition videos at me and people begging to be a part of this project.
So then, me and a friend of mine (Nick Simpson) sat down and wrote a basic storyline draft, again not much thought went into it, because as the project started to get bigger and bigger, the reality of it every getting finished was pretty small. We both realised that this project was going to be BIG, and we ended up having to write more and more people into the script. Eventually after finishing the script, we emailed out all the parts and had to play the waiting game for the actors to record and send their files back to us. I pushed on without ever expecting to finish it.
2. The voice acting I agree in places does seemed very 'I'm reading from a script and don't have any emotion' This was because some of the people (Mainly the captain) were personal friends and not actual voice actors, and I felt bad to say "sorry, but the acting sucks." Because it took long enough to wait for the audio files to be sent and I just decided to push on with it. The character who plays 'Smithy' the ships engineer is actually a professional, he does radio adverts and had a few high profile jobs so I was very lucky to get him on board.
3. I have been told that some of the scenes look a bit low quality, if made for a ps2 cutscene. Well the only way I can answer this is I did EVERY animation and render myself. I do not have an ILM studio with a team of animators behind me, nor did I use a render farm to speed up the process. I also have a medium spec pc so if I rendered everything out in V-Ray with photorealistic HDMI textures, like in Beowulf then after a year I would still be rendering out scene 2 where they start boarding the vanguard.
That said some scenes literally took a day or two, sometimes even a week just to set up. I had to add props to a scene, light it, add characters, animate characters etc.... And the render times varied. There were some scenes that were only 3 seconds long, but due to the raytracing, particle fx and all the other individually animated things going on could actually take 24 hours to render. I'm serious, 3 seconds worth of footage actually took an entire 24 hour day just to render out (the manhattan space station explosion)
I also used a 3ds max plugin called fume fx, this product creates explosive fx that is used in Hollywood films such as transformers 1, 2 and 3 and many others to . It actually took me a month to tweak and fiddle around to create the space station debris that entered earths atmosphere and impact in the city and I didn't even use that footage because it didn't look right.
If I could start again and work from the beginning I would do it all again, but I have learned a lot from this project and I have even adapted a whole bunch of new techniques that I will take with me.
That said, since publishing First contact, I have been emailed with a load of freelance animating work and even offered an unpaid job to work on an independent racing car game, so with all its cons, I have managed to make a whole lot of pros from it
