Neo-Egyptian's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Megaman - Rockin in paper]

Awesome!

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.

Totsugeki responds:

Thx for commenting! In fact, this is my very first project in AfterEffects, so I explored the basics. I might push it a lot in my future animations, it's so magic hehe.

[Old Work 7.5]

Some advice

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.

SiloZen responds:

Thanks.. i know..
In part 8 Im Redrawing Every single character..
Cause i know that the stickman bodys are a sorta trace from madness
And thanks for telling me how to cut down the songs..
Massive help
also every series will have voices... i just havnt had the time to get the stuff for it..
And thanks for your review

[The Shootout: (old)]

Really surprised!

This, by all means, should have been awful - you've never used Flash before, the concept is horribly cliched, and the sound is really bad.

However! You've clearly got a really good idea of how to animate stickmen, and there was hardly any tweening in this whatsoever. For a first Flash movie this is great - sure, the whole 'stickmen having a fight' thing has been thousands of times by now, but this had a lot more effort put into it than most first-time flashes that use the same concept.

Keep it up!

sam-delitans responds:

yea, i did everything FBF, after that, i realised that there was another easiler way of doing it,haha

[The Melcrosum Person Pt.1]

Hmm

I agree with the last review - some of the jokes are extremely drawn-out and because of this they lose all impact (the worst of all was the bit with the guy holding up the signs outside the rock place). Furthermore, the cartoon seemed to sporadically cut between serious and random. Indeed, after watching the first scene I didn't even realise this was supposed to be a comedy until you had the 'should we go to the next scene now?' bit, which seemed completely out of place.

However, as a first submission this is surprisingly decent and because of this I'm not going to try and get this blammed. For example, the artwork - while certainly not award-winning - is pretty good, especially for a first-time submission. The sound is also ok, and you've actually managed to use a lot of music and speech without the filesize going above 2 megs, which is great seeing as so many first-time Flash users have no idea how to compress a movie.

So yeah, keep it up, just try and really focus on refining the jokes and the script. Comic timing is essential to making something funny and if you drag jokes out for too long or simply repeat them over and over again they stop being amusing and detract from the overall impact of the cartoon. You've made a good first try, but it's heavily flawed - work on it!

DWT-Productions responds:

Thank you, good advise. A well thought out review and im sure it will help us out in the furture...

[Reading]

Weak

The idea behind this is good, I guess, but seeing as how the animation is designed for very young children and not the collective NG masses, I'm kinda unsure why you've submitted this here.

A few other things - it's funny this animation is about reading when you've clearly demonstrated you have problems writing. Furthermore, it's somewhat amusing that in a cartoon designed for people who can't read, there's absolutely no voice-acting, meaning that you have to - you guessed it - read the text within the animation to understand what's going on. Finally, the scenes depicted in the animation are absolutely ridiculous. Seriously, failing to put on a hard-hat in a construction site or taking a car out for a drive knowing you can't read warning signs isn't a case of illiteracy, it's a case of mental problems.

AsleepAce responds:

Well... sure I didn't take too much time on this, it was for school, anyways I guess some people dont get its more of a joke than reality.

[PATTAS 3: Train]

Waaaaaaaait a minute

Hang on - a boxcar? The opening spiel by the Pilot where he's listing things off really quickly? The quick cutaway to Pilot in church? The 'letter' joke? The movie clip used for speech? The bit where the guy in the store reacts when asked if he has any smaller bills? The end joke that seems far, FAR too familiar?

I'm sorry, but all the above things are far, FAR too reminiscent of a certain Internet cartoon I used to watch a lot. Let's be honest here - you watch a lot of Bonus Stage, don't you? Even the voice you used for Phil, sorry, the blonde guy, sounds EXACTLY like how Matt Wilson voices one of his main characters.

I'm not going to be as harsh on you as I was when reviewing the God-awful, disgusting, piece of shit series 'Ski Lift Pals' (don't waste your own time finding and watching it), but you REALLY need to get your own cartoon style. The animating style itself is pretty good, and you have the ability to tell a fairly decent story, but it really is far too derivative of BS for me to rate it any higher. Even the bits that WERE funny failed to make me laugh, because I couldn't help but think 'this is just taken from Bonus Stage'.

Tylerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr responds:

Ah. I agree with you that it is quite similar to BS. That's something I'm TRYING to get away from. But, I mean, my humor's pretty much been that way, even before one of my friends introduced me to BS a few months ago. Not much I can do there. The voice of Argyle, he was pretty much supposed to have a bit of a gruff voice (he's supposed to be some hot shot ping pong desperado or something) But that voice was so taxing on me, that it ended up degrading into that nasily type voice that it is now. Sorry if it's similar, but I'm sure that with time, I'll get my own style of sorts together. Everyone has to start somewhere.