Helbereth's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Cymothoa Exigua]

Another reason to avoid the ocean...

Nicely done flash that's both disgustingly disturbing and hilarious at the same time...

[Red and Yuffie the movie]

Hmm...

The dialogue is mostly incomprehensible.

The acting is sub-par to grade-school play quality.

The art lacks variety.

The 'story' goes nowhere.

I clicked it off half way though.

I don't see how this ever got a daily reward or front page, I gave it a 0.

[All NG Fads Die!!! 5!!!]

Don't be mad I didn't 10 anything...

Finally after I don't know how long, this thing finally debutes on NG.

I don't want to be all negative, so I will say that, for the most part, the animation was on par with the better NG submissions of the past. I think if we all knew we would have that much more time we could have made resounding improvements - I know I could have.

The music, for what it is, fits the AFD idiom, but perhaps not the animation. There are points where it clicks with the animation, but those instances are rare and sublimate the music to background noise.

The sound effects are far more rare than I was expecting. Many parts either had no sounds at all, or very few (and they were usually drowned out by the music). I took the time to mix together accompanying sound effects (even creating a few I didn't have) for my series, and I was sad to see that time go to waste.

Graphically is probably where this stands out. The motions are slick, the art is at least decent in all cases, the gore and effects are complimentary, and overall it isn't overdone. Some pieces could have used more polish - which could have been done had they realized the release would come so late.

I suppose it suffered from the downsizing required to fit the flash on NG, but the interactivity was lacking. The main menu looks nice, but is pretty boring without the accompanying music. There's no scene selections, and no nav bar while you're watching.

Upon perusing the reviews, one comment stands out in my mind - the humor. My particular part had no real punchline (except that somehow Snake is breathing fine standing on an atmosphere-less asteroid, falling toward Jupiter) and no planned comic moment. Prime's face floating by at the end used to be funnier before I added AFD5 to the asteroid - it stole the show. Dr Fuji ftw with the bombed eggs, the castle crashers clip is all mabout comic timing, and Rad24's tankman scene is well-placed for a laugh, but few others are intentionally funny. However, The entire concept of AFD is funny, and the irony is prevalent, so there's an echo of humor even without it being directed at you.

As far as style goes, it's an unfair question. Everyone here is imitating someone else's style, so the best you're going to get is a similar style to the original, but not an original style (you might have to read that a few times before it makes sense). I will say that the way in which most of these characters are executed each has its own styling, so that's where the 8 for style comes from.

Overall I'm happy I got an IM out of the blue in the middle of July - or August, whatever - asking if I'd make a part for some AFD series I'd never heard of, seen or given a damn about, really... I got to kill Optimus Prime finally (he is SO overused on NG), and I only killed Snake because it wouldn't have made sense not to - he was airless and falling toward a gas giant... I don't think there's anyone he can CODEC call to get out of that.

Anyway, peace people. I have a lv 56 paladin to level...

Radioactive24 responds:

You and your WoW addiction...I hope you come back for AFD6 :D

- Radioactive24

[Deep in the forest]

Well, it's a good attempt...

The trouble is that you may have taken some things too literally. Perhaps I didn't explain as well as I should, but that canopy (in the tut) was designed to be viewed from underneath. This shot is obviously a 3/4 downward angle, but the trees are all flat and there's no foreshortening to tell us we're looking down. The ground works well for the end (after the blast), but it confuses the eye beforehand. There's no definition between different objects either. It's easy for your eye to blur out and get lost in a jumble.

Now, to fix it you can, fistly, draw the trees (at least the front row) from a downward perspective - that is, make them narrow at the base, and wide at the top. Also, define the leaves a bit more by using a darker color and generating some highlights. It's a pain in the arse, but it will look 1000 times better. Secondly, the angle we're looking down from leaves the possibility for us to see the horizon, and the sky beyond. You could mae use of that by adding in a small amount of skyline, which opens up the angle and could allow to have some movement in the background besides the trees.

The pan itself is very crude. The trees in the distance move far too slow - they're simply not that far away, or else they would be a lot smaller.

The story itself didn't make any real sense to me, but I'm not going to get into that since this looks like an experiment.

The music was very scratchy. It's either a bad recording or a very compressed stream.

The whole thing could be improved, but I can't say I did much better when I started trying this stuff. I gave you a 3 for the effort.

[Charlie Chaplin attacks]

Not bad at all.

You managed to make it feel like an old movie. The pacing is just about right (it was a little slow at times), the graphics are complex enough to be emotive, and simple enough to get a little tedious. The animation reminds me of South Park very much so - that's not all bad. The lip synching (if you can call it that considering nobody actually speaks) is just enough to tell you who is talking before the sub titles pop up.

Overall I think you accomplished what you were trying to do, so you get props for that. It could have been better, but I don't think it would have made it much better to improve the art or the pacing.

[Lofton Films Intro]

If that's just the intro it's FAR too big...

If you consider NG's 5 meg limit and the poor people on dial-up (there's a few of them left), a 1300kb intro is less than a stellar way to introduce people to your product. If you ever plan on making fully animated flash cartoons - or even games - you don't want to spend that mych bandwidth on the intro.

Other than that it's pretty cool, but it was kinda small. You might want to put more focus on the brand name and motto rather than the logo itself - which is a rather simplistic softened bar plus some detailing. The whole thing could be done without the use of adobe (by layering gradients in flash).

I only have one question. What took so long to come up with a 10 second guitar riff?

LudBofton responds:

Yes I forgot to change the audio bit rate back to MP3 (While I was testing the movie I had it on 48khz), but I've already fixed that (notice the 728kb filesize now).
Without photoshop this flash would not have been possible.

The 'guitar riff' is actually 3 layers of guitar tracks, so that's why it took 10 minutes. I mixed them all using Acid Pro.

Also I've already created fully animated flash cartoons, check 'em out. I'm in the process of making a comedy series, hopefully the first episode will be finished in the next few weeks!

Thanks for the constructive review.

[Final Fantasy QFF]

I'd have to guess that you...

hate RPGs.

I'm not going to hold that against you. However I will hold the fact that this is a steaming pile of crap against you. Invisible mages? Were you so far at the end of your rope that you asked your pets for ideas?

Once you had the idea, did you bother with these questions:

Why would invisible mages have to get close?

Couldn't he just vaporize the two sword wielding narrow-minded do-gooders from afar?

Apart from that the title seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the actual movie. We never find out what the supposed fight for freedom is based on - nor what they're fighting against.

I could delve deeper, but I'm not going to bother. I hope this gets deleted.

Shinodan360 responds:

i do hate rpgs!!!
and i hate you too, why did u have to get all technical? "he could have just vaporised him from far" your a fucking geek pal

[Will the real Slim Santa]

I hate when that happens...

Santa Clause caving in because of Fatkins and all that... Santa's fat and immortal. It doesn't get any better, dammit!

Anyway, this is not bad for someone who hasn't been creating flash for long. Some of the animation was pretty simplistic, but it got the point across. It wasn't as good as the other one (that I saw a while back), but that was done by someone with a lot more experience.

You did kinda lack backgrounds, but that's normal for a newbie. Lining backgrounds up with characters is painfully tedious and usually looks terrible the first few times you try it.

You should (based on viewing your earlier work) improve with time. You might consider either creating a script or getting a friend to bounce ideas with. Having something solid to work toward (as opposed to just kinda making something as needed) forces you to come up with ways to accomplish the things you're brainstorming. Then it's a matter of seeking out tutorials and then going through the tedious process of implimenting what you've learned.

One final bit of advice - get into some art classes and get a scanner to import your drawings/images for tracing (or get a tablet if you can afford it). You can only do the simplistic characters for so long before people figure it out and start giving you low scores because of it.

psicicle responds:

Thanks for the nice, long, helpful review. You really are a "tough" reviewer huh, out of 12 pages of reviews written only 4 got 10s? And one, you gave out of sympathy? Well anyway, please review my newest flash!