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"Lista"

73
By on Video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgHYtdM9PME

Pawel Lyczkowski writes:

I made this animation for my diploma at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Graphic Design Department, 2010.

Made with Blender 2.49b and Yafaray.

73 Comments

  3. code on

    Fantastic design! Great lighting. Great textures. Nice soundtrack. Nice animation. Compliments!

    Don't like the story all that much but that's a personal opinion. Looks great Pawel!

    Reply
  10. aws357 on

    Awesome video. I thought it was an IKEA commercial in the beginning :D

    Nice storytelling and original idea. Animation is still a bit stiff, but the "stop motion" effect is really well done.

    Reply
  14. terrachild on

    Very well done. One of the most watchable short animations I've seen. Excellent concept and execution. The constant panning worked very well. It provided a sense of motion, literally, and figuratively. I'm impressed.

    Reply
  17. Whimsy Collective on

    @PLyczkowski Bookmarked your website. I like your tutorials and you node setup overviews. Not many blender tutors show this depth of information. Kinda puts them to shame and for the sake of sanity I won't mention their names. Love your video. I wonder did you get the scene where the subject is pushing the sofa though the door and not appear in the previous block or scene. I think of Looney toons there has a black circle on the floor or on the wall they walk or fall into it but it's masking the surrounding, then a another subject appears and he's wondering how's he doing, the disappearance act. He picks up the black circle from the floor and so on.

    Reply
  18. TLOZ on

    Wow, very well done! Great piece of work!
    I just wonder how he made that stop-motion effect without skipping any frames (?)
    Anyway, epic video!

    Reply
  19. Lee/LohnS on

    So cool!!! just love this. Had me chuckling a good few times. Wonderful style and great story.

    Hope you will apply it for the Blender Conference festival!! =D

    Reply
  20. PLyczkowski on

    @Whimsy Collective Glad you like my tips, it's possible that I will create some full blown tutorials in the future.

    @TLOZ The stop motion effect was made with constant keyframes, added manually every two frames. So, the speed of the movie is 25 fps, but the speed of the motion of the characters is about 12.

    Reply
  22. Rounin on

    This nice and refreshing. I thought everything was done well. Digging the the stop motion effect on the characters.

    Reply
  23. Anonymous Coward on

    Great work! Felt like I was watching my life.. The Ikea reference is weird as the character is equally minimalistic and a more maximalistic set would have broken the balance and interfere with the story telling, that is, taken away the attention of the viewer from the main character. Then again, I haven't seen many Ikea commercials.

    Reply
  27. chimeric_idol on

    Amazing piece of work, incredible story, great render and fantastic stylized animation!!!

    Niech zyje polska animacja!!!!!!!! :)
    (Long live the polish animation)

    Reply
  28. ByronK on

    This was so funny! Thanks and what a great inspiration. Timing was great. I laughed out loud when the main character got shocked by the second woman and when he changed the picture from a woman to a dog.

    Reply
  33. speedmonkey on

    This is a very well done short. I do have some criticisms though (they're nothing big, so please feel free to ignore them if you're reading this, Pawel).

    First, I love the stop-motion style, however I couldn't help but focus on the character's feet shaking around when they're supposed to be planted on the ground. I assume this was intentional but usually in stop motion, a character's feet are physically tied down when they're touching the floor. So they don't have the jitter that the rest of the character often has. Just a little thing obviously, but it did stand out to me because I've studied stop-motion a lot.

    Another one- and this is just my personal take- I was actually hoping that after the character adopted the dog and gave up on meeting someone, that he would finally end up meeting a woman after all, because he had opened his life up to the dog. I think that progression would've had a nice rhythm to it, and possibly given a better sense of resolution.

    But overall, I really liked it and I think its great work. I especially love the scrolling camera. It reminded me of the last scene of The Darjeeling Limited where the camera slides from one train car to the next.

    Reply
  34. PLyczkowski on

    @speedmonkey That's a very good comment, thank you. I was considering an ending when he get's a girl, but couldn't come up with a witty way a dog could get him one.

    The shaking feet wasn't intentional, it was due to a little faulty rigging. Now I would do it better.

    Reply
  35. ray on

    Nice lighting and music perfect. Only one crit, is the character design could have been pushed a little further. very nice sensitive stop motion feel to the animation.

    Reply
  36. feynman on

    Hi Pawel,

    Really nice to watch! Very imaginative approach. Like the stop gap. My daughter had to do a stop gap last year -(not 3D animation based). I think the simplicity, in colour especially, adds to the appeal of the film.

    @speedmonkey Yeh, can see what you mean (The Darjeeling Limited). Wes Anderson's other films use that kind of camera movement as well - particularly like The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

    Reply
  44. kram2301 on

    Great animation :D
    And I know that saying, you based the story of, very well :)
    It's not limited to Poland :)

    Reply
  46. Rafster on

    Hilarious!

    Very good story and execution, as mentioned! Here are my comments:

    'Lista' means 'list' in Spanish.

    I thought it was stop motion. Was this achieved by turning off vector blur?

    The end credits appeared to be scrolling sideways. Did anyone else feel that?

    There are several ways to make the scrolling scene transitions. You could have made 1 blender file for each scene and rendered them (without camera scrolling), and spliced them together in the sequencer, with the scrolling effect added.

    OR apply each rendered sequence to a bunch of planes in a long row and scroll the camera.

    OR made different 'scenes' and spliced them together in the node editor.

    OR made one very long set, with all objects duplicated . . . but this would require a complex materials set up of an animated alpha channel to 'mask' out half the sofa coming in through the door so that it won't show in the previous scene.

    OR you can just tell us how you did it.

    I'm no expert, but to get a girl-friend/wife (or anything else in life) our protagonist has to keep on trying with many, many women. That's what I'm going through right now. Unfortunately it gets tiring, and most men fail because they haven't asked enough women out. Never give up on getting the love of your life.

    I also would have liked to see the guy get the girl, but this might have made the story longer, or the action could take longer than the 'scroll time'. That would be my only critique: Boy gets dog instead of gal.

    EVERYTHING else is perfect!

    --Raf

    Reply
  47. Brian Cowell on

    Finally!!! A very good short made with blender! This is the kind of short the site should post...
    Good job

    Reply
  48. afalldorf on

    Awesome work! It looks very professional.

    I wonder though, how is it he puts wallpaper up behind the already nailed sign?

    Reply
  52. PLyczkowski on

    @Rafster Lista also mean list in Polish :]

    The stop motion effect was achieved by using constant keyframes, placed with little randomness by hand.

    I also feel the scrolling at the end credits :) I suppose our visual intelligence gets used to the motion during the movie, or starts to recompense for it, that's why the illusory motion is in the other direction.

    I couldn't render static scenes, and move them in compositor - you forgot about the perspective.

    I used an even simpler method than the ones you mentioned: I had multiple scenes in a single blend file with a duplicated room, and rendered the separately, then combined them during composition. Since the camera movement is the same during the movie, they fit well together.

    @afalldorf Haha, good vigilance there, you are the first one who noticed it :] I don't know how he does it either, but I needed this scene order for readability.

    Reply
  60. Milad Thaha on

    Wow, so beautiful! Perfect music selection. Cute story and great execution, I loved the rough stop-motion feel of it. How long did it take for you to render it?

    Reply
  65. DeMoN on

    Absolutely brilliant! I watched the whole thing with a smile on my face, a perfect mix of style and substance in my opinion. In a world where people make shorts that aim too high and hit low, this was a nice blend (pun intended :)

    Reply
  66. nimblepix on

    Well done!
    I like the twist at the end. You didn't go for the stereotype expectation that he would make his own woman from the tree after it had grown big enough.

    Reply
  71. Jon on

    Regarding the story itself...

    The thing to remember about women is that the hole is greater than the sum of their parts.

    Reply
  72. justposted on

    Just stumbled across this whilst looking for something else. Probably my favourite Blender animation (after BBB of course). Beautifully understated; perfectly polished so I didn't get any of that "it's good but..." feeling; wonderfully improved by the sound effects. Thank you for sharing it with us.

    Reply
  73. Michael on

    Loved it, engaging character despite simplicity.

    Agree with speed monkey on the story ending-probably the romantic in me!

    Also would have loved to see the tree used to give a sense of time e.g. Changing colour in autumn then leaves falling.

    Reply

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