MistyE's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Nat29 Intro]

Ah, it appears I have introduced you to one of the earliest songs ever uploaded to the Audio Portal. While writing a long, constructive review for an animation that's barely half a minute may seem ridiculous, keep in mind that I'm writing this as constructive criticism for any future flash of yours.

First off, the boy and the way he was designed. One of the things that always bugged me in your animations was the eyes and how they're just a bunch of lines. Circles with generic pupils in them would even look better. Some cartoonists can get away with lazy eyes like that, but only because it corresponds to the rest of the character well. The lack of detail you put on his other features merely emphasizes the poor-looking eyes.

I appreciate that you, unlike other animators, devote extra effort to shading your animation. Though the shading is incorrect. The light source you have in mind is very inconsistent, and if you go on deviantART and look up drawings of people, nobody shades the neck like how you did.

Also, when his arm is moving: I saw that it's partly shaded, but when it hits the part of the body where it's inconsistently shaded, it disappears. It's disconcerting to look atttt and just plain awkward.

An actual person's head is not a circle, and although I admittedly do use circles for some of my characters, their other facial features compensate and correspond well to my choice, so it masks that fact and compensates. The nose looks notably odd, as well.

When the guy was walking, I think you messed up with the easing. First things first, before addressing the easing, the boy's arms extend too much. The way he moves is like he slows down and speeds up and randomly. 100% out and 100% in is what I use, but only when he's about to finish walking, not when he's taking a step.

The text falling on the boy, in particular, was great. The actual timing and execution is probably much better than what I would have done. It's the text that's bad. It looks like a traced bitmap. If you're unfamiliar with a traced bitmap, rip off something from Google Images and select 'Trace Bitmap.' It looks very, very ugly and horrid.

My suggestion on how to fix the text would be to take the text you already have, make a new layer, lock the layer of the text and make a clean outline with consistent coloring and the text would actually look very decent.

2.5/5

Please note I'm not saying this to be mean, but only to help.

[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 :)

[Don't you just love math?]

i enjoyed this, good sir, and very educational to boot! teachers should show this when teaching math to kids

[Death by Jet]

i am not leaving these reviews to be mean, but only to help

Really poor in the art and animation aspect. The people were really poorly drawn, anatomy-wise and everything. Some lines appeared jittery and messed up and over the intercom where the guy, or kid, I should say was talking, it looked bad. in real airports, when people talk over intercoms the intercom does not make a motion like that. Maybe a few lines over it to suggest sound, but never anything like that. i do realize a static image of the intercom would look bad, so why not spice it up? add more people there, etc.

a specifically bad scene was the scene with the people screaming. when they're screaming, their mouths move, and what's up with the arm movement. It seemed random. those arms don't look like arms. in fact, i bet if you took away the rest of the person and tried to pass those "arms" of the screaming passengers in blue you could very well call them "worms" and everybody would easily believe you.

and what's up with their body? they looked deformed, really. i wouldn't be surprised if they were.

though some scenes like the airplane one looked decent, admittedly.

the sound was bad. it wasn't necessarily the voicing that was the problem, it was your microphone, as if the voice was too loud for the mic. there's equipment people use to prevent poor sound quality. watch RicePirate's "VA: Home Studio" tutorial flash. though the voicing itself was very unconvincing.

what was the point of the plot? sympathy-inducing? humorous? it had no depth, no purpose, nothing.

2.5/5 for potential

[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!