Topic: Pilgrim's Progress Part One

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Pilgrim's Progress Part One

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Part one of my brick film series 'Pilgrims Progress'. In this episode, Christian leaves home with his friend Pliable. They fall into the Swamp of Despondency, and Pliable leaves Christian to his troubles. A kind man named Help helps Christian out of the Swamp, but then Worldly Wiseman finds Christian and leads him off the path. As Christian is close to death, Evangelist leads him back to the path and safely through the gate that would lead him on to greater adventures. I hope you enjoy and thanks for watching! Please like it, share, and subscribe for more! Some sound effects obtained from https://www.zapsplat.com

Re: Pilgrim's Progress Part One

First, thanks for letting me voice act in this! It was fun.

It's great getting to see this classic story get the brickfilm treatment. Sets are large and detailed, the animation is good, (with lots of great extra touches like falling into the swamp at 0:57) and the visuals beautifully showcase the time you spent in refining them. I'm really excited to see the rest of the story, you've done a great job giving each location a unique visual flair, with many cool locations yet to come.

However, there's a small issue that sticks out to me. First, with the pacing. Sometimes there were odd pauses in conversations, almost like you had extra footage, or the shot footage ran longer than the recorded line, and you didn't want to cut anything. I know, it's really hard to chop down a shot that you are proud of or spent hours working on. Yet, the goal of every shot is to fit well within the whole of the final film. As such, sometimes they need to be adjusted/tweaked to best accomplish that.

Another pacing issue is one that could be fixed, not with cut footage, but adding some. Pilgrim's Progress is a journey. Yet this part seems compressed into a series of vignettes. We don't feel the journey. We get the swamp scene, then just right to worldly wiseman, then right after leaving him, we see Christian in the deepest part of whatever that bad place was.

If you think about the LOTR films there were a lot of hiking montages. But that helped us feel the distances of the journey. We felt that the characters had been on the road a while and helped us understand their situation. Because Christia goes from on the path to WAY off the path in just a few cuts, we don't feel his sinking deeper into the evil places, nor his breaking emotions that lead to his outcries of desperation. They are only a few seconds from the cheerful "sounds good to me" in our time.