My first SCP.
Many thanks to Sudypt, Mf99k, Netherman555, sirpudding, and Varren Erelim for giving feedback for this article.
SCP-2757 / Discussion
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This is the discussion related to the wiki page SCP-2757.
Love the concept, but it still needs more polishing.
The "wind it ten times or else" thing feels a bit tacked on for extra danger. You could make the reasoning behind it a little clearer. I'm guessing that the reel has to finish before you can leave… so what happens if you take too long to finish the story, but you did wind it ten times? Do you get a "to be continued"? Basically, the problem isn't an unreasonable one for a Dr. Wondertainment to have, but the way you have this working in the current iteration, it seems like less of a "read the instructions" thing, and more like a "this isn't a finished product" thing. I could see it working, though, if you had to somehow force it to let you wind it less then 10 times, or if there was a safety mechanism that broke easily (say, maybe the detent that only releases the escapement after you've wound the mainspring ten turns gets loose after it's been used many times- I had a windup toy when I was a kid that had this problem)
There are also a lot of little grammar mistakes: "winded" instead of "wound", places where parts of the sentence didn't agree with other parts (…with some being in tuxedos, while others resembling cartoon robbers…), but the real problem for me is that even for Dr. Wondertainment the winding thing seems like an obvious problem with a simple solution.
neutral-voting for now
Exactly. I'm only upvoting for the concept.
rhinos am i rightos
Thank you for your feedback!
Added a bit on a safety mechanism on the object, new testing log added, and grammar issues fixed.
This reads to me as a formulaic "hey kids! here's a Wondertainment product that will do unintended bad things to you!" article that I've seen on the mainlist many, many times by this point, combined with a "what if cartoons were real" premise that I have never really been interested in. I feel like I've seen this or something like it quite a few times now, and I've never been a huge fan of this sort of article to begin with.
So, there is a pretty solid concept here. Using a camera to render an environment into a cartoon world is right of Wondertainment's alley, and the consequences of such can be disturbing. Unfortunatley how this article is presented makes the idea come across as bland.
There is a lot of potential here for the narrative to develope in interesting ways, but as it stands this could use a lot of polishing to avoid the generic trap.
-1
I think it's because you do most of the expected dangers of cartoonish stuff. Think about how cartoons work harder. What are some well known tropes? Some lesser known tropes? How do cartoons act?
The possibilities are endless. I think thats the point he's trying to make I guess.
rhinos am i rightos
I think it's much better now. I hope this becomes successful.
rhinos am i rightos
I think it's a shame that this post got the response it did. I frequently lurk the "lowest rated" page, and this is by far the best article I have ever seen there. I am impressed with the fact that you resisted the urge to add something arbitrarily evil or overly disturbing (not that that's bad, but it probably would be unnecessary here). The main problem that I can see is the fact that the concept can get a bit boring after reading a couple paragraphs. But I'll up vote in support of good writing and creativity.
1
The reason why it's the best one you have seen is because the author went over some revisions.
rhinos am i rightos
(account deleted)Considering the concept, I'd have to give this an up-vote. It's a solid idea, and its implications of misuse do strike a creepy chord. Small nitpick, however:
rendered in a style similar to that of Warner Bros. Animation.
I'm pretty sure there's plenty of other animation companies that employ the same techniques as Warner Bros and that specific detail is rather not that clinical, in my opinion. I'm not too sure on what other term would be appropriate though.
Animation styles are extremely distinct from studio to studio, and a trained eye can even spot the work of a particular artist.
Do they frame on 2's? 3's? 5's? What's their preferred timing: 8 beats, 12 beats, 16 beats…? Do they space their whip frames regularly with adjusted motion, or do they draw them linearly and adjust the frame spacing? How many background layers do they use? Painted or drawn? Do they use parallax effects, or do they stick to a single plane of motion? What sort of linework do they use? Heavy? Thin? Clean? Loose? Scratchy? Or are their final prints lineless? Do they favor Cell shading? Hatch Shading? Gradiated? Semirealistic? Flat? Matte shadows or tinted? How exaggerated are their characters and motions? Unified character drawings, or lock-and-layer? Do they prefer to lock the camera to the characters or the background? Stop-and-go animation, or constant free flowing motion? …
Warner Bros Cartoons, for instance, tend to be animation-dense, drawn on 2's at 15fps, with lots of squashing and stretching of forms in motion. Flat or cell shading. Lineworks's a highlight: Light but bold, loose but clean. Static backgrounds, but very intricate and well animated foreground and midground with some parallax. Characters are animated as a whole figure, leading to very energetic, fluid animation often described as "zippy" and "bouncy" by animators.
Hanna-Barbara by comparison used a very efficient (read: fast and cheap) system that basically consisted of paper-doll cutouts in different poses that they'd tweak for different situations. Frames on like…5's or something. Yeesh. So their character's movements are pretty limited and repetitive, with a lot of "vehicle bouncing up and down with five repeating frames equals driving". Good design work, though, some rather nice matte backgrounds and stills now and then, which counts for something at least.
Disney is characterized by super-clean, fluid animation on mixed 1's and 2's. Thick, flowing linework. Beautiful gradiated semirealist shading in their film work, cell shading and flats clean enough to pass for vector for the shorts. Invented multi-layered parallax backgrounds.
Studio Ghibli: Drop dead gorgeous backgrounds, foreground animation fairly fluid for the Anime style at ~3's, with less reliance on lock-and-layer than most, and lots of freehanding in action scenes. Mix Semirealist and cell shading, lots of playing with light, shadow, and color. And lens flares. Miyazaki-san loves his lens flares.
I could go on like this for days. X3
</ art nerd>
Of course this was much more true of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies film shorts of the 30s-50s. Some of Warner's animation is distinctive now, but a lot of it isn't (Flashpoint looked more like early 90s anime than anything else; for example). I think the intent here is Chuck Jones era Looney Toons, and just saying "Warner Brothers animation" probably isn't specific enough to actually be clinical, because technically it includes everything from the very early Looney Tunes through the Spielberg stuff in the 90s like Animaniacs and Freakazoid, the Bruce Timm DC stuff, the Green Lantern CGI cartoon, anime-style stuff like Teen Titans, Flashpoint and Gotham Knights (themselves in distinct styles), the Disney-esque Iron Giant, CG features like Happy Feet and so on; which list doesn't constitute an identifiable style at all.
Those aren't Warner Bros Cartoons productions, though. That studio closed in 1962. They got bit back into animation starting in the 1980's when they opened Warner Bros Animations. That new studio works in a number of styles, but the Warner Bros style of animation refers to the specific style of animation originated by Warner Bros Cartoons in the Chuck Jones era. Animaniacs and Tiny Toons are fairly close to the classic style, though the former uses a bit thicker linework, and both have the marks of the digital transition in the 90's- lots of gratuitous gradients and cell shading because it doesn't take 36 hours and three do-overs to do that now, super saturated color schemes, that sort of thing.
The article says:
rendered in a style similar to that of Warner Bros. Animation.
Which as you note is the name of the animation studio founded in the 80's; the one without a single style.
If "Looney Tunes" was intended, I think that "Warner Bros. Looney Tunes film shorts" would be much clearer.
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page revision: 5, last edited: 18 May 2020 23:10
