SquidBonk's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Heinz the Owl]

nice work, I enjoyed it

this was a pretty good quality animation. Fun little story too. Definitely had a few laughs with the frenetic head movements and reactions. :) Having a solid style within the work along with practice in your art and anatomy are the only suggestions I can give. Your animation and timing sense are quite good.

[Gun Poet : Ace of Spades]

Anatomy issues but colouring is quality

You've got too many scribbled lines in your work. It looks like you're going for the hatched comic style but the scribbles just look messy. When you animate, try to work in a keyframe to keyframe method. [By Keyframe, I mean key drawing] The foot animation you had was very obviously just straight ahead animation. It seemed like he was just slipping in place. Space out the key drawings and you can skip a whole lot of work. foot down is one keyframe [drawing]. Foot up is another, then draw however many inbetweens you need, and it will look a lot smoother.

Shitty deal what happened to your backups, I feel your pain. Good luck and even though key drawings are tougher, and maybe a bit less exciting, you'll always come up with a much better final result. So keep practicing :)

Oh, and your colouring was fairly well done. Much higher quality than most in the portal.

Cel-Mare responds:

thanks very much for the constructive criticism. What pains me more is that a good number of the issues you talked about were fixed in the newer version :( It's ok though you'll get to see the level of my work as it is now in later submissions. Thanks for reviewing.

[Nightmare On Floor 53]

Quite a few things you could spruce up.

if you want to create an eeree atmosphere, the first thing you could try is to not have such vivd colours within your film. Remember that colours don't have to correspond to how they look in real life. Manipulate your colours teh way you would with your composition. For instance, If a character is wearing jeans, they don't have to be blue. A viewer will accept almost anything so long as it's believable in the context of your movie. In the case of your flash, try not to use just a black screen to represent darkness, give us outlines of objects within the room, making us know it's dark, but want to see farther into the room. There are so many scary implications when you can immerse yourself like that. There were compositional choices you could make too to get a better effect. You could have had the can REALLY big perspectively in the foreground so that it takes up almost half the screen. Then, when the character opens the door in the background, the light from the hall lights up the words "red paint" on the bucket. And the guy just keeps screaming when he sees it.

Anyway, nice effort on it. Maybe research some composition basics and try substituting colours in ways you wouldn't think before.

SuperDuck-Spanjj responds:

hey thats some excellent advice, thanks for taking the time to write the review. ill defo try to do some of that :)

[Koosh Fighters Opening]

A few tips if you want them

Judging from this, you really enjoy watching and creating animations. What you show here though, is that you have no handle on the basics of art and animation beyond the symbolism and cheats you see in shows like dragonball Z. Animation has lots of different ways of showing an action. fast action uses blurs, and distorted lines, or you can squash and stretch. The mood can be expressed with colour, line, and pace. The story can be developed with words or characters.. etc.

The one key to remember is that absolutely everything created in animation is a deviation or reference from real life. If you want to make more things like this go right ahead, but remember that studying life, and drawing from what you see around you will make you a stronger artist, cartoonist, illustrator, animator, painter, colourist, etc. From this, it looks like you have the drive, just not the direction. Draw friends' portraits to practice faces. If there's something in particular you can't do well, make sure you practice it twice as much.

Your art really needs a lot of work, but it also shows your potential. You just need to keep away from using anime as your only source of reference.

Always have reference for your work. Copying isn't a bad thing, but plagiarism is. Make sure you learn the difference between the two. Good luck.

[Miss.Dynamite XVII]

Great illustration as always

Your illustration is awesome. The animation could use more power though. It has the feel of just cutting up different illustrations because of the tweening. I guess that's what you were going for but even adding a couple more redrawn frames here and there in your movie will really grab attention. Great work.

[the unlucky ant]

I liked it

Good job. I like your juxtaposing of the situation. You could have upped it even farther by having the ants actually come into the scene more, as the burning continues, you see more of them gather to watch. Great storytelling.

[Taegukgi : Mayhem]

HAHAHA, love the gun switching right near the end

That is an awesome touch. If you do the voice recording for something like this again, maybe wait until no one is home so that you don't have to whisper while your character is supposed to be yelling. Really made me laugh man, great stuff.

[s.i.n::seed hunter ep [1]]

You said you want feedback.

There are a ton of issues in this flash to address but first I want to say that it's nice to see someone putting forth a lot of time and effort into something they enjoy. You have the drive, and potential and to expand on that, you have to practice on your anatomy and study from life. Not from anime.
Create anime style all you want, I'm just saying that the fact that you've only drawn anime all your life shows big time. You don't feel the 3 dimensions of the characters because you can't see the characteristics of light and shadow and how they form a character. Anime also tends to cause animators to have stiff motions rather than flowing motions because it's so analytical of exactly how people move. You have to learn how to exaggerate how you work. Draw from life often for study and fall back on anime for fun. Animate a character in a really exaggerated motion with strong poses and silhouette and the stiffer more regulated movements will become easier and notably stronger. Study different cloths for clothes. Leather, bedsheets, t-shirts, how do they react to certain movements and pressure points. All you have to do to improve is observe life around you and practice. Great effort, you have lots of potential and determination.

[coffee break]

not my kind of humour but I still like it.

Great movie overall but there's one thing that I think is really important to mention.

The biggest lacking part I'd say, is when he hits her with the cinder block. You had a big windup to the hit, him putting down his cup, dragging the block. Even when you first showed it, it was in the back of my mind. I was just waiting for the sound of the crunch. That finale would have been much much much more effective if you didn't show the hit. If instead, you used the messiest sound you could find, or even the hardest hollow thunk, the viewers imagination fills in the blank in a more satisfying way than showing the hit ever will. I was actually disappointed at seeing the hit, I felt all tensed up ready to just hear it and cringe. Something to keep in mind for your next movie. Very good work though, I like your colour choice as well. :)

[Support Our Troops]

Animations! Original Animations Please!

You can create all the propoganda-laden war flashes, fan backed clock movies, oddtodd ripoffs, and stick fights you want to keep yourself afloat on the portal. Why is it so difficult that you can't just challenge yourself to make SOMETHING unique?!

So much as seeing your name in the list makes me want to vote 0 now... jeez. (and don't go off on how you support your troops by doing this. Making a flash movie about them doesn't protect them from shrapnel, it just makes bullets fly here in NG)