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Galneda

451 Movie Reviews

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You're second to none!

Go, team, go!

Fucking amazing job. Standalone quality on this one, the whole team should be proud of this gross-ass masterpiece.

Somebody send this to Junji Ito.

Swinging at every ball here, if you guys ever need another voice just to diversify roles, I would be thrilled to throwdown for the credit. I love horror, and I've always wanted to perform in a horror role with a ridiculous twist.

Probably the best thing I've yet to see that was made using FlipAClip

This is still really hard to follow.

You got it right with the first shot - That's called an establishing shot. We see the outside of a building, so we (the audience) know that whatever happens next is probably inside that building.

Second shot is of the door at the foot of that building. This is great! This establishes direction, and we're about to go into the building.

Third shot is some blue kid with his singular foot on the desk. I don't know who this is, but at this point I'm assuming we're going to find out.

The next shot is...a kid frozen in an ice cube? But the chairs and desks are all in the same orientation, so I can assume we're being introduced to a cast of characters in a classroom.

The next shot is a kid asleep, also with his foot propped up on the desk.

And then we get Malcolm. I recognize him from the last cartoon of yours I reviewed.

Then a teacher is pointing at a chalkboard. Cuts back to Malcolm, signifying that he's paying attention. The teacher writes on the chalkboard, "Malcolm's School 3" ...and that match-cuts to a black background of the same message in white lettering.

Oh! This was the show's intro sequence! Okay. Hope we get to learn about our cast of characters.

We're back to Malcolm in class. I'm still following this so far.

The teacher is smiling really big at Malcolm, for some reason. Weird, but let's see where this goes.

Cuts back to Malcolm, who hasn't moved.

This next shot is where it loses me a little. There would appear to be a tiny woman in gigantic high-heels on the floor, based on the two mounds at the bottom of the screen. I'm guessing those are shoes? The only way this would make sense is if this were an action figure or something?

And then it just cuts to an inventory screen, and the woman is the only thing in it.

-Was the woman an action figure? That wasn't made clear in her design.
-Were those Malcolm's feet / was she beneath Malcolm? I couldn't tell, this was the first time we ever saw the floor.
-Did Malcolm pick her up? That wasn't clear either; cutting to the inventory screen could just mean he has an identical doll in his inventory. We need to see him picking her up.

It cuts to a closer shot of Malcolm, and then an extreme closeup of his arm throwing the doll away. The teacher grabs it.

Now with the teacher distracted or occupied with the doll, (which is apparently what he was smiling really big for a few shots back), Malcolm sneaks away.

Cut to Malcolm at the door to his classroom. Where are the other kids in this? One of them is a asleep and the other one's frozen, but the blue kid has with his one foot on his desk is still awake. Is it just these people in the classroom? We don't know, because we haven't seen a wider shot of who all is in here. Or WHAT all is in here.

It cuts to an exit sign with a laser grid over it. The last shot that we saw had Malcolm at the door to the classroom. Was this after he exited and now we're in the hallway? We never saw Malcolm leave the room, so the audience might think he's still in his classroom, and this EXIT door is within the classroom walls.

If you use wider shots to paint a scene, it tells your audience where everything is in relation to your character. It informs us all what the environment looks like.

It cuts to a closeup of Malcolm, and I'm still unsure where he is. If he's in the classroom or the hallway because there's no context. If he's in the hall, there could be lockers or a water fountain or something you would see in a hallway.

Then it cuts to a spooky kid...a ninja? In an air vent? It's kind of hard to tell what's going on anymore, because of the lack of details and animation.

The last time I left a review like this, you said you had a difficult time understanding what I was saying.

If it because of your age or a language barrier or something else? I'm trying to help your animations improve.

kaithomasisthegoat responds:

I’m sorry if you didn’t like it

"WELL IF IT ISN'T THE MANGO"

"I need more clinky clinkies made out of bestgar to save baby gogo"

"BUT YOU TOOK OFF YOUR HELMET IN FRONT OF SOMEONE, GOODBYE"

"This is that way"

"THIS IS A WAY"

ExtraLongLunch responds:

Now go bathe in the land of the living water...for then- you will be absolved of your sin.

That is the only way...

I saw this in the under judgments and I came back because it's stuck in my head. Please help.

It's really hard to follow, because there's no consistent scene composition. In the beginning, its clear that he's in the nurse's office, and we can tell where everything is in relation to itself. But once he leaves that office, everything starts becoming scrambled because of the lack of animation, lack of contextual background assets, and lack of direction.

It's not animated, and it's not even a flip-book, it is a slideshow of shots in this state.

Here's an example, at 1:06 he's entering the men's room. It's a close-up of the door that says MEN'S, and we're looking at it through a POV of Malcolm entering from the bottom right.

-Next frame-
Malcolm is standing against a grey background, presumably the interior of the bathroom, in a medium shot, looking to stage left. In this sequence, the flow of motion is established from stage bottom right to stage left. Things are moving to the left. What could help clarify that we're in the interior of a bathroom is if the background had sinks & mirrors, towel dispensers, the other side of the same door, a trash bucket overflowing with crumpled paper towels, stalls, or anything other than just a flat color. Hell, tilework. Graffitti. It's a blank canvas for you to decorate.

-Next frame-
In an abstract art piece, we have a background that's 2/3rds gray and 1/3rd blue, separated by a black line. This reads, contextually, that a guy is talking from behind a closed stall because he asks "Does anyone have toilet paper?!" His speech bubble is moving to the left of the dividing line, but it isn't clear where this stall is in relation to Malcolm. The audience has to guess and it's a 50/50 chance that we think things are still moving to the left, or we notice that "Oh this video game level's background is grey, so the stall must be blue, therefore to the right of him"

-Next frame-
Our hero calls out "NO" over his shoulder to the screen right. If people guessed correctly that the stall was to the right, we're still in the scene. But if they guessed it was to the left of Malcolm, this breaks the 180 rule, and it disorients them. What could've helped it become clearer is if the stall walls were articulated, like you drawn the top of them at the very least so that we can say "Oh, it's a stall, and it's over there."

Eventually there's shenanigan's involving an air vent, and the direction gets decidedly muddled in the sequence.

If the audience was being led to believe that things are moving in a consistent direction, we have an idea of where everything is in relation to our character. Suddenly that's proven to be wrong, or we're blindsided by a weird compositional choice, and without motion to help convey the flow of direction, we're going to get lost. Without recognizable landmarks, we're also going to get lost. If that keeps happening over and over again, your audience loses interest and they're just like "whatever, I guess this thing wasn't made well or something" and this gets forgotten.

Look into the 180 rule, add motion to characters and camera alike, and detail to your environments to help the audience understand where they are in relation to your character and their journey.

kaithomasisthegoat responds:

My brain is having trouble process your comment and I don’t even know how to animate

Boy that stuff IS pretty good, holy shit.

This is amazing! Exceptionally well-done; I'm familiar with ToonBoom Harmony, and you've pulled off some really impressive stuff with the programs at your disposal. Extremely recognizable talent, and I'm invested to see where this is gonna go.

If you ever need a male voice actor, throw my hat into the pool; I just ask for my name to be spelled right. Been working professionally with Cyanide & Happiness more than half a decade.

Aisle99 responds:

An ΩΜ representative will be in contact with the next appropriate opening.

Richard William's Animator's Survival Guide talks about the distribution of weight in a character's walk cycle at length, and through his observations, it sticks out whenever a part of a character remains uncannily stable when the whole of the body is hustling.

That three-quarters angle at the start, is a really ambitious full bodied shot- and it's done really well here in mannequin form- everything reads. But what isn't translating as well as it could is the twisting happening as the shoulders rotate opposite of the hips. You can get by with making the shoulder circles be wherever, but it's going to be a completely different feat on a full-bodied character, with specifics to anatomy and clothes. You already know this, but the twist is going to be a difficult facet of animation to master.

My eyes are also drawn to the positional relativity to the head. You look at an actual runner/a person running in real life, and the head bobs and weaves, swaying side to side as weight transfers between the feet. The point between the eyes, if looking from the front, should draw a "U" or a curved bowl shape. Sometimes even a mobius strip depending on what's going on at the hips and shoulders.

What I'm seeing here in these tests are a lot of steadycam heads- they're all horizontally stable for the most part. And take that critique with a grain of salt; lots of animations do it, and stylistically that works to comedic effect, or budget-conserving measures in cartoons.

IF you're striving for a more realistic stride, use live models for reference. Even if it means looking at yourself in a mirror, recording a friend, or having a friend record you. Even the top-budget animation studios will film live models performing the desired action- not even to rotoscope them, but to have live reference. If they're doing it, to great success, you can do it too. If there's a voice of doubt or anxiety decrying that as cheating, you can rest assured that it'll still be a tremendous creative effort on your end replicating your reference onto paper or vector.

Use references so that you're practicing and informing yourself on what you need to do to make it look correct.

That's what'll advance your talents.

-This is Phobotech!-
I've done animatics for Cyanide & Happiness, Purgatony, and WWE Storytime! I'm also a voice actor that's performed roles in One Piece, Gundam: Witch from Mercury, & Smite!
Check out my sci-fi novel, Umbra's Legion on Amazon Kindle!

Geoff Galneda @Galneda

Age 36, Male

Voice Actor/Animator

Collin College

Dallas, TX

Joined on 9/22/03

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