Score: 0

"Some advice"

submission: Ball of Light

date: May 29, 2009

As a fellow AfterEffects user, I've got to say this - the special effects should be dictated by the story, not the other way around. In other words, don't make a tiny movie about nothing whatsoever purely because you want to show some effect you've managed to create. By all means keep learning new effects and testing them out, but it'd be far more creative to come up with a short script that neccesitates the use of special effects, rather than putting them in a 20-second film with no story or dialogue whatsoever.

I know what you've submitted is just a special effects test and I'm perhaps being a little harsh, but if you want real advice then visit any AfterEffects forum on the net and speak to people there, as the NG Portal really isn't the best place to put stuff like this up. I highly recommend searching for 'video copilot' in Google, as this has an excellent forum for AfterEffects advice and techniques, and has several high-quality tutorials.

Score: 10

"Awesome!"

submission: Megaman - Rockin in paper

date: October 26, 2008

The concept is highly original, the video is brilliantly executed, and the humour is great. Also, as a fellow AfterEffects user, you used the program well but didn't go over-the-top with it.

This is a great tribute to an awesome game. In a word: fantastic.

Score: 8

"I feel obliged to review this!"

submission: Red Hot 6 6 6s

date: October 26, 2008

Given that my own series is entitled 'The Everyday Adventures of Steve' I was instantly intrigued by this cartoon. The pacing is decent, the humour is good, the drawing is pretty nice, and overall it's a pretty sweet cartoon. Nice one!

Score: 5

"Interesting idea..."

submission: Brackenwood: The Game

date: October 11, 2008

...but it's broken. Not only is it FAR too hard for the average player, but after finally getting to the final stage and managing to get through without hitting anything, I was told I'd failed. I repeated the stage to check I hadn't accidentally hit something, but no - you simply get to the end of the stage (when all the blocks have disappeared) and you automatically fail.

Anyway, it's an interesting idea and I liked the challenge of learning the block positions and timing, but it's a shame you can't complete it and I imagine the majority of players will be extremely annoyed with the difficulty.

Score: 10

"Brilliant"

submission: Easy Way Out

date: September 14, 2008

This is truly excellent stuff.

Score: 2

"Some advice"

submission: SiloZen Adventures Pt 7.5

date: April 20, 2008

I've been watching through some of the SiloZen series and I figured it's about time I offered some constructive criticism. However, I'm not going to talk about the plot too much because, while I don't like it too much, I realise you're quite set on keeping this series going and I realise a lot of people like this kind of series, so that's fair enough.

Anyway, I think you really need to start thinking about progressing your skills as an animator and finding a consistent drawing style. The scene with all the characters in perfectly highlights your need for the latter - every single character seems to have a different style of drawing, including ones that are blatantly traced (most of SiloZen's body is obviously copied from somewhere else), ones that are fully-drawn but quite crudely, and some that actually have stickmen bodies which frankly makes no sense. Going back to the animation itself, you still seem to move the characters about with really basic tweens and this makes the fights unbelievably choppy.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to criticise you for the above, I just figure you should take a little time out and really practise your drawing and your Flash skills. You seem to be making these animations at a really rapid pace and while you're adding superficial improvements like slightly better backgrounds and more traced stuff, what you really want to be focusing on is using frame-by-frame animation and drawing everything properly. I mean come on, you've said above that this animation took you 'forever' to do, yet judging by the date you submitted SiloZen 7 I'd say you actually only had about a month to make this one.

Just give yourself more time, that's all. The people who like your stuff on NG aren't going anywhere, so why don't you spend a good couple of months (or more) on SiloZen 8? It'd be awesome if you could learn stuff like perspective and drawing characters from different angles, as you'd then be able to put more depth into your animation and it'd just generally make everything look a lot better. Doing voices for the characters would also be great, although that might be a lot to ask.

One last thing - you may already know this, but if you import a song into Flash and then use it in a cartoon, it doesn't matter if the cartoon itself only has about 20 seconds of that song in it, the WHOLE THING will be contained in the finished swf file. This means that even small cartoons (like this one) can end up with ridiculously large file sizes, so what you want to do is get an mp3 cutter (there are loads of free ones online), cut out the part of the song you need, then import that into Flash. The size of the swf should be dramatically reduced and it'll mean people won't need to load 10mb for two minutes of animation.

So, there you go.

Score: 6

"Simultaneously quite decent and atrociously cheesy"

submission: Xander Fox

date: April 12, 2008

The quality of first-time submissions has been pretty decent today, and this is no exception - despite how critical you are about your own drawings, they're actually pretty ok and you certainly don't have 'zero skill', as you put it. Sure, your drawing could use a lot of work, but don't beat yourself up over it!

Anyway, starting with the positive stuff - you've put a proper plot in place, the episode moves at a good pace, and you've made a pretty good stab at some decent animation (like when the door gets blown towards the screen). It's also nice to see you using a fairly smooth walk-cycle, even if it just tweening.

Unfortunately - or fortunately, depending on how you look at it - this is possibly the cheesiest thing I've ever seen in my life. Not only was the story amazingly cliched, but everything Xander says is just pure comedy gold, especially:

"Ah, the ending... it fills me with peace"

I'm not sure if the 'so bad it's good' nature of the dialogue was intentional, but still, it made the cartoon twice as entertaining. I also love how Xander plays up the whole macho thing almost as badly as the cast of 300 - not only does he walk around half-naked for no reason, but he seems incapable of running. Seriously, he's either casually walking or diving all over the place, whether that be out of a helicopter (mid-flight, I might add) or avoiding a flying door. Genius! I also particularly enjoyed the shock sprinkler ending, which was absolutely ridiculous but hugely entertaining.

On a more serious note, there are lots of things I'd recommend adding or improving on. First, I'd check out a few basic lip-sync tutorials on Newgrounds - it's nice you sort of had a go at it, but it just looks Xander is gurning everytime he says anything. Second, while I don't think your drawing is as bad as you make it out to be, it certainly good get a lot better. This will obviously come with practise, but for the time being you could easily put more work into the backgrounds and little details, just so everything doesn't look so grey and boring. Finally, if you're going to carry on the series, it'd be pretty cool to flesh-out the story a bit. Where did these psycho androids come from? Who is Xander? Who built him? There's lots of scope for stories here!

So yeah, there you go.

Score: 2

"Bleh"

submission: electric energy

date: March 22, 2008

For a first-time submission this isn't exactly awful, but it's just so... empty, somehow. As cliched as most stickmen movies are, at least there's generally some proper interaction between characters, whether it be in a proper hand-to-hand fight or running around firing guns at each other or whatever.

What you've got is effectively a stationary guy getting murdered in a bunch of fairly repetitive ways and that's literally about it. Compared to excellent stickmen Flashes such as Xiao Xiao 3 and The Jungle 1, it's very basic. Sure, I know it may seem a little harsh to judge your first-time submission against extremely professional ones, but obviously I can't help but compare stickmen animations against ones I've already seen on Newgrounds.

Anyway, I don't want to totally piss all over this so I'll end by saying the animation is at least better than the majority of first-time stickmen animations I see in the Portal (which, shamefully, usually rely on tweening) and I reckon if you made it longer, made the characters actually interact more and polish it up a bit this could be fairly good. As a final note, just remember that stickmen animations are almost certainly the most cliched thing you see on NG (right next to bad sprite movies), so if you want one to get a good score you're going to have to make something exceptionally good.

Good luck!

Score: 7

"Great first submission"

submission: You Close The Party !

date: March 18, 2008

This is probably the best 'first-time' flash I've seen on Newgrounds in a very long time. I've become so accustomed to seeing first-time submitters on NG put stuff up that is either unfinished or simply terrible so this was definitely very refreshing to see.

There are a few problems - the lack of colours, some awkward animation, the non-existent story and so on - but I'm totally willing to overlook these because this shows an awful lot of potential. Sure, it's not the most refined animation I've ever seen and it'd be great if you could come up with a story and give the characters speaking parts, but this is definitely a very impressive start.

Good work, keep it up!

Score: 2

"Just a bit flawed"

submission: Tech-Avoider

date: March 11, 2008

I like what you've tried to do here, but there's just too many problems with it. First, the game is just too hard - don't get me wrong, I quite like a challenge in a game but it's far too easy to dodge something only to be stuck in a position where it's impossible to escape losing. Equally, the cursor is just too big and makes it stupidly hard at times to move between falling blocks.

Second, you HAVE to sort out the sound - I have no real problem with the choice of music, but it plays over itself every time you press 'replay'. There are plenty of really simple Actionscript tutorials that will show you how to make a sound start playing and not repeat itself.

Third - and by far the most important point - the whole 'move the cursor about to dodge moving stuff' is possibly the most cliched type of game you get on Newgrounds. I'm not saying you can't make a fun game using this idea, but it's been done hundreds of times before and in many cases much better.

Anyway, it's a brave attempt at something new so just work on something with more depth and iron out some of the technical problems.