TheDevilMyself's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Good-Out (Unfinished)]

Finish, then resubmit. There's a whole site for partially finished things.

[Sandwich]

WinRAR - lol. Decent enough, not a terrible storyline and not too terrible animation. Good work!9

PentilexTV responds:

Thanks! Constructive criticism is the best I can get!

[Runaway Child]

Very nice animation....

You lose major points for having it loops. At least you had the music stop. If you haven't turned this in yet, you'd best put a stop(); in there with a replay button or yer gonna probably lose some credits.

Other than that - i thought having the kid's head be that big was kind of inappropriate for the mood. A bit comical for a bit serious thing - "Hey for feeling so small and insignificant he SURE HAS GOT A BIG HEAD" lol. but seriously - imagery is important.

I really loved the bottle rolling part. Just an excellent animation right there.

If anything else... i could say you should put it at 24fps and animate that bitch out, but i understand it's just for a class and that might take more time than you have.

Good overall - i gave it a 5.

OH yeah, and as far as the music goes - since there's poetry, i'd say stick with something instrumental. I kept thinking i was gonna hear the words in the lyrics and i think it distracted from the video a bit.

So there ya go - i figured you probably put this up before you turned it in to get some criticism, so criticism i gave. Keep it up, kid.

D

moknin responds:

Actually the loop was deliberate. This work was supposed to put in a gallery context so I don't have to restart it manually. But still I admit that I have uploaded it too rush (it is due today) before any modification is done

[Horse poop]

Not bad for a first flash, i suppose

There's plenty to be improved here. Most of it deals with the slightly more complicated aspects of making a flash animation... first one is preloaders - this is pretty much standard fare for flashes - you want the content to load before hand to avoid any errors in the flash due to improper loading... most commonly - sound and music will be off.

But you have no sound or music. and that's the second bit. Learn how to put that in and control it.

Next, you'll want to learn basic actionscript controls like gotoandplay(); and gotoandstop(); .... these will allow you to firstly stop the animation at the end (at which point it is customary to put a replay button and / or credits... also it lets you jump between scenes. This is helpful with wholly different places the flash takes place in or camera angles things like that which you want represented in it.

Your animation is pretty good, really, but try not to rely too heavily on tweening. look into making your symbols movie clips and then making that symbol's animation do the morphing work while having the tweens provide the symbol's overall motion. I think the key to making a really great flash is to master the balance between tweening and frame by frame animation. (visually, at least)

hope this helps out. Looks like your flash will probably pass, but if i were you i'd put all these suggestions into it, add some more to the story itself, and then resubmit it. (upon which time, just delete this one - it's not doing anybody any favors by being here -no offense-)

Good luck!

D

jathom30 responds:

Thanks for the info. Do you know of any tutorials online that would be worth checking out? Your bit about gotoandplay() went right over my head.

[Turtle and Mista Apple]

Whew... ok

I hate to give this such a low rating, because it's obvious there was plenty of time put into it at least, and that, to me, translates to effort.

However, you asked for constructive criticism, so here goes:

Animation.... Tweening isn't everything. Frame by frame helps out immensely in places... specific spots include the beginning with the elephant creature? He was growing and shrinking for no apparent reason... it would be a simple thing to animate breathing or some other sort of idle state. Look into using onion skins to help make a frame by frame Movie Clip for your character.

The lip synching was terrible. Lets start with apple... the way this character is set up he's "ripe" for the classic type of lip synching where you just draw a different mouth position for each sound. Look up a tutorial there aren't too many different positions you'd have to make, and then all you gotta do is line it up with the right sounds. As far as the turtle goes, if you watch south park, that kind of mouth movement needs the help of the rest of the character's body to convey a bit of realism to its speech. Honestly, at your skill level, i'd just give him a mouth like apple's and call it good. Much less work to make it look decent.

So content... it was a little harsh. Cartoons like Ren & Stimpy go to extreme lengths to soften the blow of the terrible terrible things they say and do to make it funny. You aren't at that skill level so it just came out wrong. Alot of it has to do with timing... the characters talk too slow, the pace in general isn't fast enough, but camera position changes, animation styles, background, this all contributes to the making wrong funny phenomenon.

Ok, now that i'm sufficiently awake i should STFU lol

I didn't blam this, but i didn't vote high either, so good luck.

Pliskin99 responds:

Thanks alot dude, as I said any constructive criticism is greatly appreciated in my books. I'll try and work on all those things in my next cartoon. Thanks again.

[My Art]

hmm

Honestly, i was expecting something worse than this.

As others have stated, there is an art portal.

Also, you need to figure out what the "stop music" command in actionscript is and use it, just before the "start music" so it doesn't overlap like it does. It's kind of annoying.

Otherwise, not the worst art in the world, especially for your age. Keep it up - make some animations!

yoman333 responds:

Thanks! =D

[8 bit crunch]

My eyes hurt

This could have been good.

It loops at the end. Bad bad bad.

The intro made me smile in anticipation then you ditched the 8-bit and went full on flash. Remake it all in 8-Bit and then we'll talk.

DJWOJO responds:

Unlike other people, I will agree with your criticism. That's a valid point. I will take this into consideration forfuture animations.

[Ikkle and Toad - 2]

Another great installment

Hooray for ikkle and toad! I think you should have kept the deleted scene in, imo. Otherwise, just wanted to let you know you're still doing quite well haha...

D!

Kamize responds:

Hooray! I'm glad you like the series. But I have to disagree with you about the deleted scene. It totally broke up the rythm of the animation and was out of place. I think it was more amusing as a link in the back personally. So I kind of did keep it didn't I, I kept it as a deleted scene.

Thanks much!

[The Stroll]

Pretty decent

I don't think the scanning worked so well for parts that weren't to be included in the background. Also you should outline with darker lines and crop the objects all the way up to them so they don't have the bordering white crop junk

First thing i noticed was his walk sequence was a bit rough. The transition between your last and first frame is nonexistant. You should copy the first frame and paste it just after your intended last frame and use the skinning to help determine what you need to do to make the character get back to where he started. Then you can just delete the copied first frame and there you go.

Sounds more complicated than it really is and is very worth it in the end.

Really, i liked it. It was quaint - almost dreamy. i liked how it had no sound effects but just a floating theme.

At some parts though you lacked background of any sort and that should be fixed... adn that break from the staircase... you should have drawn the two objects separately so it doesn't look like it gets cut out from the staircase.

Anyways... there's my two cents. Good work - nice to see people experimenting!

D!

MorrowDays responds:

Thanks for all the tips, they're definitely going to help later on.

The walk sequence was like that because it was more of a jump sequence that I made at the beginning of the film so that it'd line up when he was jumping from stone to stone. Now I might redo the walk sequence for the rest of the animation, but when I was making this version of the film, I was under a deadline for a division of the "sprockets" international film fest, called jump cuts, which is a sort of minifilm fest for students. This was my entry for the grades 7-9 category (I'm in grd.7) and I had to hand it in today. like you said, it's not perfect, but it's decent, and I think it'll work just fine.

Backrounding: One idea I had last night was to have paint splatters in various points of the movie where there wasn't as much backround stuff (example: right before he gets eaten by the fish) which I think would add to the experimental aspect of it, so if I do a re-sub, I'll add that, as well as the darkened outlines of some of the scanned art.

So, again, thanks for all of the comments, I'll keep them in mind. Glad you liked the music and the quaintness!

[Trendy!]

Trendy ;-)

Hahaha fun stuff - I love ska but never really dug RBF. Ah well. Who sings your credit music?

MetalDart responds:

Having a Wonderful Time- Tiny Tim