Curse Of Feanor - Part 1 Released!

Erati's has released the first part of their project. It is part one of a cinematic series. I just watched it, and it was amazing. The filesize is large (~60 MB), but you really should get it and check it out.


Links:
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CoF Forum

Main Download

Alternate Download Site

Nice, now there is a Lord of the Rings cinematic - took long enough.

Aaaaugh! its a .rar!! I can't open it! Anywhere i can get a free winrar?

Curse Of Feanor - Of Feanor And The Unchaining Of Melkor
By: Alerionh & Erati
Reviewed By: Iron_Ian

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First off, hats off to Alerionh & Erati!
They've done one hell of a fine job in making an great cinematic!

TERRAIN:
One word "breathtaking". The terrain is purely awesome.
The beginning of the cinematic takes us through a golden forest. The environment is beautiful, with a bright and golden atmosphere to it. Some neat techniques were used here.
In the second map when I first saw the city of Tirion from the inside, I simply said "Holy shit!"
Curse of Feanor part 1 features beautiful terrain, like no other I have seen in a cinematic before.
Custom skins and models were used to highly enhance the experience. Erati also used a highly effective new panorama special effect to create the effect of being able to see far into the distance. There are even moving clouds!!!
20/20

SOUND:
The ambient sounds fit very well and make for a very immersive environment.
There is custom voice acting featured, and for the most part it is good. However, the the narrator's voice acting was very hard to hear, and I didn't know what was happening most of the time. There are no subtitles featured, which though I think is a good idea, with somewhat inaudible voice acting, it makes it hard to fully understand the cinematic.
16/20

MUSIC:
Lord of the Rings music was used. Though we've all heard it many times before, and I would normally drop the rating for using this music, this is a special occasion. What better music to use for Tolkien's world then Howard Shore's musical masterpieces.
20/20

CAMERAS:
The cameras were very impressive, giving some wonderful shots of the world. There was very little lag (only in some of the very large shots in Tirion) on my 900 mhz Athlon. Only a few shots in part1-1 were perhaps not quite revealing enough. It would have been nicer to see a few more shots of the elven place sticking out above the trees.
Fade filters were used well, and much of the beginning of the story is told through a series of fade filters, narration, and great sound fx.
18/20

STORY:
This is the story of The Silmarillion, a book by J.R.R. Tolkien that describes the history of Middle Earth. I have not read the book myself, and since this cinematic depicts this story, I will not grade Erati & Alerionh on it.

SPECIAL:
There are some really nifty new things in Curse of Feanor:
- The panorama effects are very cool, as are the moving clouds.
- In COF when a unit is talking, Erati has used the portrait model so the lips move and all!!!
- The scale in COF is amazing!
- A vast number of skins, and some new models as well highly enhance the experience.
- Voice acting enchances the cinematic (though the narrator is slightly inaudible, this is the only cinematic besides COTD thats had voice acting).
10/10

OVERALL:
94/100 - 94%

A job well done!! My congrats to both Alerionh & Erati!
This will be another wonderful cinematic to join among the ranks of the few other great cinematics!
I highly look forward to seeing your future work Erati, and I hope we can congregate and share our ideas to continue to create even more impressive work!

For those of you that are turned off by a 60 mb download, I can tell you right now that it is well worth it! Even if you're running on a dialup connection, this is a highly recommended download!

Go to www.rarlab.com for RAR stuff.

rar > zip

Tha was really breathtaking! Though it took a while to download, it was really worth it. The terrain was awsome, plus the great sounds of nature, like birds and ect. Good job! :D

there is no denying the fact that the terrain was UBER!!! u skinned almost everything to look completely different. u even had new animations. very nice!!!!

the only one thing i didnt really like about it was that it was too "narrative-like". almost to the point where it was sorta like a documentary. especially the first one. the second one was a bit better. but it was just a minor thing. it doesnt escape the fact that it was really awesome. i was just hoping for some action packed ass kicking, or a large battle scene.

Wow, The interior of the houses was incredible! The city was insane to, I realy likes how the mouths moved when they talked.

I agree with Iron Ian, the voices were two quiet in relation to everything else, I had my volumn way up at full and I still could only half make out what was said.

Also very clever use of Portrait models, made it much more like a real film :D

Myself, I didn't like it much.

Let me just say that the terrain was AWESOME. It was awesome. Truly awesome. Although I think you overdid it just a little bit with the camera rotations. :>

As said, the narrating voice was just too quiet. To me, the whole time it just sounded like muttering and random gibberish, and thus, I couldn't really catch on to the story. Which is pretty much most of the reason I didn't like it.

Other than that, everything was pretty good. The skins, models, terrain and music was awesome. But make the voices louder next time, that was the main flaw.

Thanks everybody for the feedback.

As I said in our forum, we are aware of the problem with the speaker being not loud enough. I sent a fixed version to Draco and will tell you when he uploads it.

The first time i watched it, it was amazing ^_^ terrain and all was just great but the second time i watched it it was all messed up the tree were the thing goes around it up like the pathway in first cin was super thin and the pathway and archway was huge and the little backround things you guys add in were offplaced and then in the second movie the bridge before the gate was messed up it was off placed and some of the scenes when in building were messed up could see the sky ect. :(

well i am not sure if i did somthin to change it or what but every time i try and watch it now its gibbled. Give me feedback if you know what happend. :(

Did you open the map in your worldeditor? COF was created using umswe and weunlimited, so if you open and save it in the normal editor, you'll get a hell of a mess. Happened to me more than 1 time during the development :)

Hmm, when I unzipped it, it said the first scene was a corrupted file. Guess I'll try downloading it again, hope it works.

Mine said it was corrupt also