smokinjoeevil's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Strange Days]

Slow paced... no point.

I was expecting something really great what with the file-size limit you went through the trouble to request be raised for you, and the cracking sphere logo in the beginning was top-notch... but the video itself left a lot to be desired. For one, your expression both facially and bodily was the equivalent of poor voice acting. When you jumped from drawn objects to you holding something, there was a noticeable jump in the video footage. Like someone else said, this is to be expected somewhat... but with the action being so slow to progress in the video it was more annoying than forgivable. The little green guy was only fairly well animated, and didn't make any sense whatsoever in the context of what else was going on. The background was really very drab... which I understand was in an attempt to make it look like a canvas on which you were drawing, and to keep from kaing things difficult for the frame to frame video animations, but you didn't draw enough to fill it in or make it anything worthwhile... it just stayed drab for the most part. You didn't even make the "swooshing" door open, for goodness sake, it was just more canvas into which you conveniently walked. If that was supposed to be impressive, it needs some work... like having another area visible through the door, You could have easily used a layer on top of the video to even make the door black, like the room beyond it was dark, and have you fade into the darkness of that next room by simply doing a motion tween on a black graphic of the door overtop of your video body. It wasn't necessarily bad... but it is not what I would call good, and certainly doesn't live up to expectations you set forth in the description.

S-K responds:

If what you're saying is there's not enough attention to detail I partly agree with you, I had ambitions for this far beyond my abilities at the time.

The very first idea draft was to have so many character cameos they can't all be listed here, but the other important thing I never mentioned was I was literally learning as I went along with this, probably the biggest time eater was masking every individual frame so it all looked like it was interacting more convincingly, add to that I had to write enough crap to fill a small book about the history of animations using techniques like this before I could even get started within about 4 months and you start to get the picture. The rest of the time I have worked on it has been spent preparing it back to be viewed in Flash format as I feel it was intended.

As for compression if you've ever worked with video you should know that alone can be hell balancing quality with filesize needs.

You have some impressive action scripting skills, but you need to bear in mind I was exspected quick results compared to the way you seemed to have total creative freedom with your movies. You'd be amased how much ideas get flung out the window when you're starting out in something totally new to you and someone's on your back exspecting quick results. Maybe I wasn't ready for this style of animation based on my drawing skill alone, and it shows in places, but if I never tried beyond my limits I wouldn't have learned all I have from this.

If that's not good enough for you then consider this a stepping stone towards something better

I recommend you view some other flash movies which have attempted similar techniques or try yourself for the best understanding, because to put it simply vector cartoon characters interacting with real life scenes can be hellish to do convincingly at the best of times...

[AC's Clockification]

More like "Netherlands Clock"

Add some stars... those colors aren't just used for the U.S. Flag.

AmericaClock responds:

Did you watch the end? He gets stars at the end. and I didn't say it was only for US. Is this why you voted low or something?

[dessicration]

Really good animation...

It was very well drawn in the style it was in, and the animation was smooth for the most part. The chronology flowed well without skipping around too much or leaving too much out to make you wonder what was going on.

The only thing I wouldn't be too proud of is the 600+ layers. Unless you counted across all of the separate scenes in your movie, it makes me think you simply don't know how to use scenes. You should really look into it. It could save you TONS of headaches in having to scroll through the hundreds of layers you say you had. Ignore this if the movie WAS separated into scenes... but if it was all created in one time-line... whoa.

joe-spink responds:

yeh 600 layers anoying but i was to bothered scrolling throught it all but when i made a mistake yeh that peed me off alot lol

[Cold Winter 1]

Mostly good...

The people could use some work... many of the objects such as the buildings in perspective and the vehicles looked much better quality than the people, which kinda threw the whole experience off for me. Also... in the intro, when the logos are being displayed, the Biohazard one just looks bad. You could tell that whoever made it doesn't know how to draw perfect concentric circles using the Flash drawing tools... but that they had tried and failed miserably.

Shadow-Kamikaze responds:

lol the biohazard logo i havnt edited since my 2nd movie =P anyway thx for the review

[Intro. FrenchFriesClock]

Your fries are luke-warm and soggy...

No preloader (thought that was almost a requirement around here), and the text you used on the background color you chose for the sub-titles was awful (light-green on gray? May as well have not even been there). Backgrounds were sparse, and the colors used were kind of drab and un-inspiring.

Macaronic responds:

I forgot about the pre-laoder. :(

Anyway, thanks for the review!

~FFC~

[Revenge of Master Chief]

Funny concept, and pretty well executed.

Some of the animations were a bit jumpy... I noticed a couple times that, even though something wasn't animating at the time, it would jump a few pixels out of place (for example: Mario during the intermission score review). And zooming in on the 8 or 16-bit faces looked kinda messy in the bridge battle. But otherwise... cool.

whereiszack responds:

yeah lol its my second flash ever, im still learning but thanks for the imput ill definately try to make the next one better

[StarCraft: Alliance]

Good movie with a pretty engaging story.

Star-craft was an awesome game, and you did it justice with this movie. The only thing that kinda got to me was the use of the prespective scrolling used in like every single scene. There wasn't a single scene I recall that was just a straight shot of a person or thing. Everything was scrolling to the side. It was kinda dizzying.

LogFish responds:

Yea I'm going to cut back on the panning next time, you'll see hehe. Good point though thanks for saying so!