MistyE's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Chip Goes Shopping]

Needs improvement.

When you're drawing something in Flash, try to use the brush tool - the line tool has always given out a shoddy, default look. For instance, the shot you included in the preloader. It'd look much better if it was drawn with the brush tool.

If you don't have a Wacom tablet and the line tool is your only way of effectively drawing, then here are some pointers on how to make it look good:

-varying line quality. fat and thin lines should be added when needed
-no gradients. a.k.a. the things that say "Linear" and "Radial" in Flash. gradients look ugly most of the time and are only good for certain special effects, for example, a realistic sun or a rainbow effect.

Those are some of the ugliest clouds I've ever seen. I say this because it appears you made little to no effort to actually making them look like clouds rather than ugly brush tool blobs with horrid gradients. There are different types of clouds, not just one and the colors you chose don't correspond to the other stuff in there. google "clouds" and draw more than one type of cloud.

your backgrounds are bland. i am talking about "Better Buy" in particular and the lack of detail you put on anything. put some backgrounds, some 3d perspective, anything to keep it from looking and feeling empty.

when the squirrel is climbing up the ladder, he isn't even facing the ladder. he is facing the camera. the actual climbing isn't credible at all. and when's he moving around all over the place during the song - that was one of the worst parts. if you wanted to suggest motion, then actually animate the squirrel in different keys and arcs. time him to the song, don't just move him around the screen.

in response to your response to s3ction8's review: gradients don't look nice. they don't add depth to the visual scene. Shading does. Shadowing does and even actual timed animation gives the impression that you're bringing a still image to life rather than mindlessly motion-tweening something.

I'm not writing these reviews to be mean, but only to help. 2.5/5 for potential.

Ronga1979 responds:

Thank you so much!!! Great pointers. i needed to hear in were i could improve (Allot more, lol). I know you'r not trying to be mean. I respect every once opinion, and will use all of the feedback i get, to improve. Hey... i only started e few weeks ago in Flash. :-) And i'm eager to learn more to create better animations. So, thank you so much for your review. :-)

[RayWilliamJohnson-Parody]

it's nice to see a young person who DOESN'T like RayWilliamJohnson. so this flash pretty much summarized Ray William Johnson

spot-on parody

5/5

MartinLarson responds:

Thnx :)

[LEGO Land Ep. 2]

the fight scene was good considering you used Legos for its entirety and it was well-done. the blood looked passable for something done in MS Paint, so that's fine

wow that was short. in fact, it's so short this is all i can write about it. ah well, i'm sure there will be longer episodes

artistunknown responds:

Yeah, this one was short since all it was was the fight. Usually episodes average around 3 minutes long, with episode 10 being 7 minutes long, so that's something to look forward to.

[LEGO Land Ep. 1]

in the beginning with the note that the Lego guy read, writing it with a moderately thin Sharpie would've worked and I see that because of the camera quality that you had to actually go in Flash and re-write the text with the brush tool. it doesn't look good. some of ti was downright illegible

yep, the song you chose isn't very suiting to a fight scene. i understand you have limited resources and all, but no music would've been better. also you can just get your music off YouTube or download music from the Audio Portal. look up "show no tears" by NemesisTheory. it's really good for that kind of scene and it sounds awesome to boot

i can see some marginal improvement in episodes 3 and 4. mainly because you used a computer to overlay text instead of writing it yourself and ripping it out and holding it manually. i'm glad you fixed this, especially since in my first paragraph i covered the illegibility issue

first episodes are probably one of the most important episodes of any show - they attract an audience and a potential demographic and if it's poorly done then you'll have to rely on somebody finding a later, better episode and that can really be bad since the plot will appear very disoriented. usually first episodes contain an organized setup of the protagonists that the show will center on for the next 9 parts.

even with limited equipment, tbh this could've been executed better. i can understand starting late in the story and then it evolving into a bigger storyline with more tension and characters that have depth

i think that's what you were going for here, but when it hit the credits it felt very disorienting and jumbling. i know you can't fix this since you already did this almost three years ago but i'll still cover this topic in case you ever decide to make another series or for whatever reason.

overall, this was disorienting and sub-par for a first episode, but this doesn't deserve a 1.47. good luck on your future endeavors

artistunknown responds:

Again thank you. I have know clue what I was thinking when I had used paper for text. I guess originally I wasn't going to edit them into video, I don't really remember, but yeah.
There is some back story to it, not much but some. I'll admit, this isn't a very good thing for a first episode (it's a reoccurring thing I see in my work is the first episode is usually the worst...). Yeah, I do plan to have some stuff after part 10, this story line is concluded, but this is only a small part in the big picture. I've had a script for a "chapter 2" sitting on my computer since maybe late 2010, early 2011. I haven't had time to get any work done on it, but I really need to. It's going to be far superior to anything else I've ever done, and the production values will be great (since I've improved over the years, I have an editor that uses Sony Vegas pro, so tons of fancy edits there). Well, I'm glad you're staying true to your word, and actually watching all of these. Part 10 is definitely something to look forward to, it's 7 minutes long, scripted, and it looks great, hopefully the file size isn't going to kill me... Well, hopefully parts 5 and 6 should be up tomorrow, and hopefully I see more of your reviews.

[LEGO Land Ep. 3]

After I reviewed episode 4 and read your response to my review, I decided to watch episode 3 and see if watching this provides me with a better understanding of the overall plotline.

Before talking about other aspects, I'd first like to point out the 'Play' button in the beginning. Even when it's not loaded, you can choose to play it, though all that would come up would be a blank screen. I'd have to wait for a while and then assume it's done loading and click play. Just go to Google, and google 'NG Flash Loaders' for official preloaders, and copy and paste one of them onto the loading screen, it's easy.

Now onto the review.

Sometimes text went by too fast and I very barely finished reading before it immediately went to the next frame. In fact, sometimes animation was too fast-paced that I'd literally have to right-click and uncheck 'Play' to pause.

having the guy open the gate and then having him say "that worked" was basically a reiteration of what the viewer just saw and was completely unnecessary

"aw, crap, the road's blocked!" this part went by unexpectedly fast. when they walked through the snow i expected a struggle, or at least something longer other than him saying "finally, we're out!" after about what i THINK is 5 seconds of them walking

when the guy points out the whole town being under the snow, usually "revealing" shots like those focus on the town being under the snow for at least a few seconds, long enough for the viewer to grasp that or to have any effect at all

that scene at the cabin went by extremely fast, like they only had a few seconds of film so they had to rush through the entire dialogue scene. also if you import this into a video editing software, some of these timing flaws can be fixed, i believe

is it just me or did "That's a nice butt" come completely out of nowhere

it's also interesting how in one scene it took them 5 seconds to get somewhere and it takes them 3 days to go somewhere else. i could be very wrong here but there's no indication of direction

and to be honest that credit song sucks

now to review episodes 2 and 1 since i am watching this thing backwards

artistunknown responds:

Yeah, I forgot to mention that everything went by extremely fast in this one, I think at the time I was tired of things going by so slowly, and was testing out speeds, and not much control with wmm. Yeah, the whole "that's a nice butt" line did kinda come out of nowhere, except there is a sort of back story involving those two characters, like I've said before, it wasn't scripted, so most of the time the dialogue isn't going to be great. Yeah, that song is kinda stupid, but like I've said, I just used what was on my computer. I guess at the time I was thinking along the lines of "well, wills character is starting to look like a horn dog with the inclusion of this female character, oh this song seems to work..." Oh yeah, almost forgot about the preloader. Strange, it doesn't have to load for me... but yeah, I've tried working with preloaders before, but could never get them to work. I guess I should try again for the next episode, since these are pretty big files.
Well, glad you're watching them, and don't worry they should start getting better, and I might even go back and try to fix some of the stuff. I'm pretty sure all the synch issues should be fixed in the next episode, but I could be wrong, I know I get it right in one of them... Again, thanks for the review.

[LEGO Land Ep. 4]

Even by old 2009 standards, this isn't anything very good. Stop-motion animation in itself isn't necessarily respected among flash animators and traditional animators, and when you have a choppy video and jittery camera movement, it emphasizes on the bad qualities of a stop-motion animation.

Some stop-motion animations pride themselves on having a very good image/video quality, though the quality here isn't that good. Though I guess I can overlook this since you admit in your description that the quality here isn't that good and that the quality gets better as it progresses, so hopefully that won't be a problem for any future episodes.

But even though this was made in 2009, there's no reason to use that as an excuse and not to touch things up. Sometimes I find old crap sitting somewhere on my computer, but I usually don't re-submit them in their original state, I finish them up and do cleanup work on them. So voice acting fits here.

Even if you aren't a good voice actor, there's a multitude of people who are good voice actors, and even went to the extent of forming clubs and organizations for voicing other people's creative works. For text boxes, though, you could've made it at least fancy since we'll be reading off of them the entirety of the episode.

The storyline was... okay. Nothing more, nothing less. It was interesting at certain points, though to be honest, the poor animation quality distracted from we're supposed to be focusing on: the story.

The obvious transition scenes that you got from Windows Movie Maker plague the movie of an unprofessional vibe; anybody who's seen their share of amateur YouTube videos are very well familiar with that font you used in transition screens. I HAVE A SUGGESTION! I think you should look up elevator music on Newgrounds or YouTube and download it. Then you should put elevator music for every transition. It'd make the default WMM screen more bearable. Another MINOR complaint is the tiny white border at the left. This can easily be fixed, and I'm sure it's probably fixed in the next episodes.

There are some obvious spelling errors ("beleave") and even in the description ("bottem" is "bottom") but i'm just a grammar nazi

There's a jagged turn in the plot here. One minute, a team member dies and they appear to be devastated, but the lack of voice acting fails to emphasize the extent of this, though from the fact that they see a random chess board and decide to play right after, I'm sure they aren't very serious about what they're doing. Oh yeah, and "PREPARE TO GET PWNED!!" sounds like something a 10-year-old would say. "UR GETTING PWNED NOOB!!!!!!!!!"

well at least at a scene near the end, you put music, despite how unfitting it might be.

But something about this movie makes me want to keep watching. judging from the WMM video quality, I am assuming this series made its debut on YouTube. I'll look up the future episodes.

Good luck. and I'm not trying to be mean, I'm only trying to help.

artistunknown responds:

I completely agree with everything you said. Yes, I could improve the quality a lot and get rid of the windows movie maker feel (yes, they were originally made in moviemaker). If I can get my hands on the original images I'll try to put them through flash, but as I have tried this before, I know it's a pain to have to place several hundred images and keep making a keyframe every frame. I realize that even though it was made in 2009, that's not an excuse for the quality. The quality is just bad because I didn't really have the right equipment at the time. My stop motions have improved greatly over the years, and will keep improving as new techniques are learned. Now touching on the story. The plot seems kind of meh, because originally I had not written any of them, the story was all in my head. Since nothing was planned out, except the broad plot of the entire series, it was executed poorly. The only episode that was actually written is 10. The quality of them don't start getting almost perfect until 9, because I finally got a new camera (and learned about macro mode), and yes, the last two episodes do have voices (ep 9 is just me, and then 10 there's several).
I can't go back and redo these mostly because they were made in windows movie maker, and I don't have access to the original files at this moment, plus going in and changing everything isn't really worth it. If I do try something like that, the file size would skyrocket, so that's another reason. Everything you pointed out was simply because I was inexperience at the time, I had the skill, I just lacked the equipment. They truly do get better.
Yes, they were originally on youtube, I had to take most of them down due to copyright though, which is why I'm putting them up here, so at least someone can see them. Yes, the music is unfitting, again I had very limited resources, and just used whatever music I had on my computer (music choice also gets better and more relevant later on).
Well, I hope you continue to watch, and see the improvements. I look forward to see your critiquing on future episodes.

Oh, and if you want to look me up on youtube to see some of my other stuff, search artistunknown95. Have a good day, and thanks for the honest review.

[Alley Cats]

I expected something completely different, but for what it is, the lip sync fit to the song, at least. Is it just me, or is it odd that all of the characters appear to have the same voice? It felt awkward the entire time, but then again, they could just be lip-syncing to the song, though in the description, it suggests that they are actually singing to it.

The characters didn't look nice, some of them looked downright ugly. You should probably search for cartoon cats as reference material, as it would definitely help.

And when it auto-replays, the sound goes out of sync.

3/5 for potential.

kurodeshiro responds:

thanks for the comment. As for all the cats having the same voice probably i didnt explain it well. The idea is the 4 cats are miming to the song just like how for example u and 3 other ppl would mime to the same song all having the same voice. As for the characters well...thats ur opinion but will take it into consideration.
I am new to this as this is my first animation uploaded here but appreciate ur comments non the less
will learn form them in future projects.

[Teaser Trailer]

As a teaser/trailer, I'll have to say that it succeeded in that particular aspect. The good animation and fitting soundtrack choice has made a newcomer to the series like me interested.

In the art and animation aspect, it was very fluent and well-done. While some of the characters appeared simple, the animation more than compensated for this.

The soundtrack was also typical of what one would expect from a trailer and fit the mood.

3.5/5

ThePivotsXXD responds:

Thanks!

[Call It What You Want-KT]

Animation/Graphics:

I enjoy flashes of the typography esque. They're always pleasing to the eye to watch and the mixture of graphics with text works well. The different fonts used were interesting. Everything looked absolutely great.

Concept:

It's a typography flash, 'nuff said.

Sound:

In typography flashes, sound always plays an important role and in this particular flash here you chose a good song.

Overall:

Awesome. This has too low of a score. I hope you get/got an A+ for this.

scoonie-1 responds:

thank you and yes, I did get an A

[True Friendship]

Well, the animation here was superb. Everything was animated so well and fluent and the art style was very appealing. Something I liked about this was how some of the characters weren't exact traces of the actual ones like certain other movies, but rather your own art style. Though Twilight Sparkle has gained some weight! Very good choice of color and well-done shading.

The movie corresponded well with the soundtrack and the soundtrack was very nice as well. The story, while not to the extent that I cried, was touching and storyboarded in a good manner.

It's sad to see something as great as this rated low merely because they hate Friendship is Magic, a great movie indeed and an honor to be 3rd place in the same day you got 2nd.

5/5

Piggybank12 responds:

Thank you for leaving a review as well, I do appreciate you taking the time to do this!

I've been getting quite a few comments and reviews on the art style: a good number of people like it, a lot more people like it but noticed how fat Twilight seems to be here, and a few people don't like it. I'll have to try to decide what to keep in my art and what to try to remove, and try to get some sort of balance as a result. I originally intended to go with a more accurate art style to the show, but ended up scrapping that due to time constraints. Plus, like you said, I thought just drawing it by hand and animating it my own personal way did more to make it stand out from other MLP animations, yet still be accurate to the show.

Don't worry, when I finished this and watched it I didn't cry either. Although I assume that's because I've been working on it for so long that I've grown numb to it, but that's just me, haha.

It is a shame about the down voting, but I expected that from Newgrounds. However, despite the MLP content in this I thought the story and the animation itself did enough to help this stand on it's own against the backlash, which apparently was the case. It's about judging it by it's merit, and not because OH CRAP PONIES 0/5.

And I noticed I ended up stealing away your 2nd place spot: sorry about that! Although I will admit, I am pretty happy about even earning an award here on NG in the first place. I did not expect that at all. :D