The Lamp - ID# 279
Shepard High School
Dramatic Narrative
Entry Description
A lonely man in a stranded house spots a lamp, but instead of befriending it he fights it.
Copyright Info
Recent Teacher Comments
- 4/28 9:22 am - Works Well - Great animation! Cool set design. Clever and funny story. Loved the character getting turned to a skeleton from the light blast! Needs Work - Ending was very abrupt. Maybe add the credit image at the end instead the beginning? Music felt a bit too much like a YouTube video.
- 4/27 9:57 pm - What works: The stop motion is very impressive. I especially appreciated how you used camera movement and lighting changes to drive the narrative along. You conveyed so much emotion and energy with the characters' movements and the different compositions and frames. The pacing of the editing was also excellent. In just a few minutes. so much action and story took place. I especially loved the drama of the above shot at 0:53. What needs work: This is so tight and so well done, that it is hard to criticize it from an artistic perspective. However, I have some ideas of how to improve it from a "doing well at festivals" perspective. The following pieces of advice are from the "festival" perspective. Please know that I trust your artistic vision and that you should take these crowd-pleasing nuggets of wisdom with a grain of salt. If you want to compete with other 5-minute videos, you need this to be in the 3 to 5 minute range. You have so much wonderful movement, but don't be afraid to slow it down and allow for pauses between the moments of action and conflict. It would add a whole other layer of preparation, but dialogue could be an interesting component to add to this. Dialogue would also help justify those pauses in action that would extend the time. Also, the next layer to bring this to a whole other level is adding Foley and other sound effects. Having the audience hearing the action (the characters footsteps, the lamp crashing through the wall, etc.) bring it to life in a whole other dimension. Final thoughts: So amazing. As you can imagine, it is almost in a category all of its own in this competition. I would strongly suggest setting up a Filmfreeway account and submitting it to either animation-focused festivals or under the animation category of fests. This is certainly good enough to make waves in a variety of fests, and you would likely get more animation-focused feedback in those festivals as well.
- 4/22 12:39 pm - This definitely took a lot of time, but it’s done very well! Your storyline makes the film interesting to watch and makes it enjoyable. You’ve got a clear message as to what the character is doing in order to fight off the lamp. You also have some great soundtracks. The calm one definitely helps set the mood of how the character is just waking up and wanting to go about their day. The second and more intense track shows the intensity of how the character wants to defeat the lamp. You also have a great variety of lighting. Especially at the end when the lamp turns its light on. Your editing had a great pace. I do mention in my comments below where you could shorten a clip. This probably took a lot of work, so great job on this! I really love the stop motion! Please see some of my comments below: 0:50 - Great job using a close up here. This not only shows the emotion on the character's face, but also shows us that he’s dressing up in armor to go and fight the lamp. 0:55 to 0:58 - Great shot here showing the character opening the chest. I do think this could be shortened by a few seconds. 1:03 - Good choice of lighting here. It seems to be as the character turned off the light but has maybe a candle lit in the room somewhere else. 1:25 - This is a great scene! 1:29 - To make the ending less abrupt, you could continue the music and slowly fade it out. You can also fade the video to black so that it fades out with the music.
Judge 1
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Improvements:
Judge 2
Positives: I'm a big fan of legos and have lots of respect for stop motion. Both of those make a great combination. Overexposing the light adds emphasis to the how dangerous it truly is. Good job.
Improvements: When it wasn't intentional I think your wide shots are a little overexposed compared to your close ups of our character.
Judge 3
Positives: I mean what's not to love about some stop motion animation, you did a great job with it.
Improvements: I didn't really understand what was going on (though I enjoyed watching). Give yourself more time to come up with a way to tell the story, or begin with some text over a black screen to give yourself setup for whats about to come
Judge 4
Positives:
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