Galneda's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Christmas with Dad and Me]

Nice!

You did a really good job with this flash! Those 2-3 weeks paid off! The characters look great, and as difficult it is to display emotions through skull-masks, you pulled it off very well. The body-language was animated beautifully to carry the story along...it was some really nice work!

I lol'd that their chainsaw was right there by the door with the umbrellas and I lol'd at the ending as well! The rest, I genuinely felt pathos for the kid...his sulked over depression with the bag of coal and his murderously upset face extracted an "Awwww" out of me....same as the final embrace.

Because even homicidal internet maniacs can have touching family moments...

Dialogue was proportioned out perfectly in my opinion. Though Santa only had one line, it was necessary to the plot, and any additional dialogue wasn't needed. Sound effects were great! Especially the start-up of the chainsaw as Dad's approaching.

My ONLY complaint......ONLY single solitary complaint:

That preloader screen is really boring and bland....this one complaint is set back, however, by it's quick load-time! Still, I can't give it a ten because the preloader was weakly executed, but I most certainly can vote a five.

That I have no problem with at all. :D

Great job! Keep up the good work, and gratz on Daily 1st!

EM549 responds:

Haha, you're right. I was so excited to get it submitted I just kinda threw the preloader in there at the last minute. Glad you enjoyed and thanks for the great review!

[The stickroom]

Normally I loathe stick figure movies...

But this made me lol. :D

Great job! Funny premise...ultimately what saved the flash for me was the character's unique body-language...they moved well for a stick animation, and you can tell they were all hand drawn. You displayed a great amount of effort into this, so I'm doing my best to save it by voting five. More-over, you showed conscious effort in syncing the action with the music...a point that seems to be lost for most people, and I feel like it deserves recognition......even if (most of) the Matrix soundtrack is rapidly approaching the "decade old" age. (Just fuckin' with ya :P)

The facial expressions, the visual comedy is what stands this flash out from other millions of xiao xiao wannabe's throughout Newgrounds' history. In the future, I'd like to see what you can do with amped up creativity....from here on out, strive to constantly out-do your last animation.

Your second flash will be better than your first, third better than the rest, and so on and so forth. In other words, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!

[A Newgrounds Christmas]

It was charming.

Very awesome for the holiday spirit, and NG fanboys throughout the world. The cameo's were well done, although there seemed to be more emphasis on Swain's Blockhead and Mastermind than anything else...almost making it disproportionate with other cameo's. It's like, "We got Tom Fulp, Swain, JohnnyUtah, Swain, Egoraptor, Swain, this guy, and Swain!" y'know?

(Don't get me wrong...I love Mastermind. :P)

That, and Egoraptor's humor seemed....strained. The Kenstar reference was weakly plopped onto stage, as if to say, "Here." and walk off. That whole bit where Egoraptor was all over the place about that arm-wrestling match tried SO hard, I felt embarrassed FOR him.

In-all, I think what would've helped the flash tremendously is if it had a plot; The Grinch wanted to silence the citizens of Whoville, Polar Express challenged faith on a mystical journey to the North Pole. Present a conflict, a story structure...stuff like that. Y'know, WRITE something....this would normally be the point in the review where adding content like that would help the score, but my opinion can't beat over the feverish preteens that five it the moment they see the turtle from Toss the Turtle convulse in a puddle of it's own juices.

References seem to take precedence over creative material in the eyes of the average user.

*sigh* ....Oh well.

Voted five. Merry X-Mas!

[May the Force be with you]

Impressive Animation!

You got really cool dynamic camera motion, but when the clone troopers first came in, it got a little too shaky, making it difficult to follow. Moreover, you're limiting your visual potential by keeping it at that terminal side-scroller view.

Think about it...by keeping it in that same 2D perspective, you have almost no diversity in-between shots. It would be much more exciting if you mixed it up.

You're also limiting your visual potential by keeping them as sticks. In my eyes, that's very lazy and unoriginal. Dish out simple character designs, and make them more...lively. This flash demonstrates you have the ABILITY to animate, so if you're going to do it, do it right. :D

The voice acting kinda came out of left field when they/he first spoke on the speeders...it was almost too clarifiable considering they're going 50-90 mph on those things, but I digress. If you had set something up before the fight, allowing the audience to follow how these characters fell into conflict, that would be tight, and it would prepare us for dialogue later...but in all honesty, that final line "May the force be with you" seemed so snobby, it kinda disgusted me.

The special effects will probably reflect high scores among other users...as they should, because they looked great! Being a Star Wars nerd myself, though, I'm having difficulty understanding a blue/silver/red AT-AT in the same shot as a Clone War era drop-ship...again, though, I digress. :P

I gave it a 3. Keep up the good work!

[End is the Beginning]

Pretty badass!

Great visuals and overall, well done!

My only complaint, and has been my complaint with EVERY flash music video, is the footage for the chorus is more-or-less the same each time the chorus plays (I'm aware of how each are different from one another...that's why it's "more-or-less")...I always thought to myself how much more impressive that, even as the song progresses and takes you new places, it KEEPS taking you new places in familiar parts of the song....

...but then again, I listen to a lot of Prog-rock. lol...

I thought you did a great job! Never stop animating, because with time, you'll only get better and better, pulling off even more complex visuals.

...like the spinning, 3/4th's shadowed globe...that LOOKED GREAT, and I have no idea how you did that...

Voted Five.

[Death's Shadow 1]

I'm having difficulty believing this is your first

...because it's pretty damn good.

-There are a few minor spelling errors you should check up on. (Off the top of my head, I knew there was "longe" instead of "longer" , but there might be others.)
-There were also a few minor inconsistencies with the character designs. When the black guy first went down, he had that photorealism to him like the other faces did, but from then on he was vector drawn. Although the photorealism added to the gritty details, and only complimented the rest of the flash's very "Noir" feel, I would try to keep designs consistent throughout in the future.
-The green font...it's not that I outright have a problem with it, but there's just something I don't like about the look of the fonts. Possibly because that shade of green didn't mesh well with the background, or maybe it's just the design of the font...I would switch it up in that area.

Other than that, though, it was very interesting. Like I said, it had a really nice "noir" grit to it. The garbled voices were a little odd, but unique to the flash's credit. If you were to build on this, I'd love to see how deep you could make the story arch in this red-sun, bleak world of lawlessness.

In other words, keep up the good work! You'll only get better from here on out by doing more and more! Keep pumping out flashes for the experience of becoming more comfortable with animating, and challenge yourself by focusing on animation techniques you're not particularly good at.

Once you attack your weaknesses in animation, you'll quickly become a power-house, because if this REALLY IS your first flash, that's pretty incredible.

jabasil27 responds:

Haha, damn, I did miss that one letter. Thank you for the feedback though, it definitely gave me more direction. Thanks to all.

[Two Strange]

Heh

Not bad stop-motion, actually...it seemed to go really smoothly, and if you keep it up, you can be an absolute master at this kind of stuff.

What crippled the flash's score, though, is the audio of the characters were WAAAAY too soft...even if they are mumbling gibberish, I want to hear it, because it's a method of the character's to display emotion, or human reactions to what's going on...so when I turn it up, THE MUSIC IS BLASTING!

It's like, say the audio for the voices are at 5...the music is at 15 or some shit...balance them, don't make the audio disproportionate.

Also, it's on a loop. I'd highly recommend throwing a preloader on there at the very least; just use one of the available ones in the download section, and there ya go. I STILL don't know how to make a replay button, but as long as you have a preloader with a play-button in the beginning, that's really all you need.

Great fun, though. Keep up the good work!

Flapjak responds:

Yeah I know what you mean. The problem with the sound was to do with the mic which was really soft at pick up. I have a new one now it's all good. Thanks for the review

[Madness: Rising]

Wow...That's intense.

Nobody has anything on you in the side-scrolling fighting department...that shit was WICKED! I loved the creative license you took on the textures and design of the cross-heads, and the Clown straight up looked evil, almost H.R. Geiger-y.

But, unlike your past side-scrolling brawls, you never once had a clear look at them. Sure, it's supposed to be frantic, and chaotic, rapid-paced and everything, but it rarely ever stood still.

The red trailing effect was very interesting, and I liked how you incorporated the destructible environments.

My only problem was rendering the shell still attached to the slug in the 3D rendered bullet in midair. The shell would've been ejected out the side of the gun, and all you would have seen in the air was the soft-cone shaped slug...

...unless, I guess you could say, it was a special gun the shot unexploded ordinance...that would be fine. :P

Great to see you back! Don't get discouraged if you had higher expectations for this flash; it was still incredibly well done, and animated skillfully.

Happy Late-Madness Day! Voted 5.

[M.O.T.O.R]

Absolutely Badass

-The music was awesome.
-Blew my mind for a Madness flash.
-The action was really well done, as well. My favorite being the suspended lightsaber above the trooper, and being force pulled through it.

I also dug the hell out of using the grounded starships cannons before he got out in the hallway

But what completely blew my mind was how you incorporated 3D into it...the lighting and the dynamic camera angles were brilliant.

I have to ask, since I'm taking basic 3D rendering with Maya every Thursday at college, how did you manage to import the 3D animation into flash?

Like, what all did you have to do?

The only constructive criticism I can provide is the action could have been more rapid. I'm looking forward to your response!

Voted 5!

DutchinLive responds:

I did maya in my digital media course, and it makes my brain hurt, but I wouldn't mind learning it again. Swift 3d is basically a 3d flash engine, same system as Maya, no NURBS, all polygons. It has an exporting feature which makes your rendered scene a .swft which gets imported into flash on 3 layers (depending on settings), object, highlights and shading or something.

So it basically comes in as a frame by frame movie clip in flash, ready for you to screw with it how you wish.

PM me if you want.

[DBZ: "Saiyan's Paradise"]

LMAO!

I lol'd at a bunch of the lyrics in here man...I agree with everyone else, in that it needed to be colored and animated, but this song kicked ass!

Might I suggest uploading the song to the Audio Portal? I'd throw it on my Zune in a heartbeat.

Great job! I loved how the artwork paralleled with the original "Gangster's Paradise" video...all the more reason why it would've looked even better animated and colored!

But when it all comes down to it, I was thoroughly entertained. Voted five!