Bezman's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[MZ's G&W Collab Parts]

spend some more time practising

The music choice was actually pretty cool. I kinda recognised the tune but wasn't sure what you'd done to it until I read your comments.

The animation, in my opinion, was pretty poor. Just a bunch of unconnected bits and bobs badly animated. In my review for the green and white collab, I said, "for the most part it seemed to fall into an uncomfortable place without jokes or narrative and where neither the subject matter nor animation quality were of a high enough standard to be really enjoyable purely on their own merits."

Really, unless your animations are totally amazing (and frankly, yours are passable at best) you've got to support it with some cool subject matter, some jokes or some narrative.

I'm not gonna point out every flaw, but here's a couple of tips.

- think about line width. When we see elements drawn with differing thicknesses of lines, it looks incongruous. Why is the gun drawn with thin lines? Or the walking man? Or the text?
I'm not saying keep all lines the same width - one common technique is to use thicker lines for objects closer to the 'camera' with more distant objects or backgrounds being drawn in finer detail with thinner lines. However, here it seems to betray a lack of thought.

- Draw your elements with a more confident hand. When you're using the brush tool, use confident strokes. Otherwise you end up with wiggly lines where 'stop' is almost unreadable and the pictures seem like you don't have a clear enough idea of what you wanted them to look like.
I'd recommend you spend some time sketching a few hundred pictures in a sketchbook.

The tween of the guy walking seems neither abstract enough to be enjoyed at a purely visual level, nor is it a close representation of a walk.

One part I did like was the white blob with two holes cut out for eyes. Simple but visually appealing.

However, all in all, I'm just gonna suggest you spend some more time practising and maybe spending some time with pencils and paper.

.:Review Request Club:.

McZero responds:

BEST REVIEW EVER, Man your awesome. But I'm a very good artist. It's juts I suck with a mouse. I got 3rd highest grade in artclass.

[The Green & White Collab]

Why those colours?

I'd be interested to know the thinking behind those colours. I can understand having low-contrast colours for something slow or some old-timey scene maybe, but here it just seems like an attempt to induce a wee bit of eyestrain.

Seems to me that lowering the brightness of the green would have helped, but as I say I'd be interested to know your reasoning. I can only imagine it was set that way as a change for change's sake.

The actual animations were all reasonably well done and I did enjoy the changes between line-based animation and solid shapes.

However, for the most part it seemed to fall into an uncomfortable place without jokes or narrative and where neither the subject matter nor animation quality were of a high enough standard to be really enjoyable purely on their own merits.

FrozenSheep responds:

Firstly, I picked the color for no reason what so ever.
Well, that was very well written review and i agree with you about your last point.
Its found it hard to get group of fairly experience animators in a short period of time, so i picked anyone with reasonable aniamtion skills. I had a few good animators on board, but i'm still pretty happy to have fairly unknown individuals contribute.

So all i'm saying is i'm happy with it.

[I Am Jebby]

Dull for the most part.

I wasn't too amused - maybe because I never saw the trailer you mention.

I liked the brevity of it all and the brevity of the DDR bit was cool and made a nice contrast to the voices later on. I did chuckle there.

The simplified design for the animals was cool, though I wasn't too keen on Jebby as a character.

Anyway, For whatever reason I found it dull for the most part. Sorry I can't articulate why I feel that way.

Battosai810 responds:

well, not for everyone i suppose. I have my own little world I keep my characters in, and if you don't like it, that's your opinion.
If you see the trailer it's making fun of, I think you'd find it a bit more entertaining - search for "I Am Legend Trailer 2" and try giving it another chance.
thanks for the review.

[Videodrug]

Both stylish and funny.

I liked the fact that any message about drugs was leaning towards being subtle. I didn't realise it was to do with that until reading your comments afterwards.

Watching it as a straight joke I enjoyed it. The mood was evocative with the spanish (I think) voices, wierd characters and odd TV sounds.

I enjoyed both the jokes - both the 'mistake' for a moment with a disc and also the revelation of what the revered video disc actually contains.

The reveal of the peanut brain did suggest your disdain of TV rubbish nicely.

All in all, a cool piece - both stylish and funny.

Atzu responds:

I'm glad you enjoyed it.
All the animation style was part of a metaphor that contains everything I mentioned in the comment; for example, the peanut brain means a lot of things, it not only symbolises the damage caused by the mediums and drugs but the consecuently stupidness of all who can't quit their adiction (any kind of adiction like coffee or videogames), including me, just because of the "pretty colors" (the ones on the screen and the ones you hallucinate) which are "able to paint our very minds".

So, I must confess I do not only disdain TV rubish, but sometimes I just hate all kind of screens and wonder why the hell then I'm still here and actually planning to continue till death... I'll tell you why, I just love TV cartoons, videogames and stuff.
It's just normal, sane and bizarre love-hate. :p

Thank you for taking the time to review.

[Citation Needed episode18]

:-/

The starting screen was great - nice drawing and a joke that made me chuckle.

The Elite Beat Agents are always good for an easy laugh, but I was kinda disappointed with the rest.

For the most part, the script was just way too obvious - both with the other two jokes (outrunning, death) and the cliche'd slow reveal.

Your drawings are nice, but the animation was obviously limited.

It's a stylistic choice and I'll try to respect that but I personally feel that when you change your medium, you should try and take advantage of that medium, rather than trying to emulate another. Broken Saints and stuff of that ilk does annoy me marginally - it seems like a lazy half-way point with neither the unique advantages of animation, whilst losing some of the unique advantages of comics.

Well, I suppose it's good that people are experimenting with different ways to interpret given mediums.

[Let's Have Some Fun]

Fun and funny

I liked the front screen - cool fonts and barcode, though I felt the NG play button looked a little out of place. Also, though they all look cool, I'd suggest considering lowering the number of fonts and thinking more about their placement - I think random placement only really works with hand-written fonts. I feel 'fun with appliances' might have looked better all as one font (the distressed font you use for spacewalk or the pseudo-pixellated one maybe) and lining up with your name.

Animation was fun and cheery. Simple graphics but it works. I'd suggest maybe using the pen or brush even for mechanical things though, rather than the line tool or rectangle tool.

The song was obviously kick-arse - it's just a shame it was so short. I love that 'I put the coffee grinder in the microwave' voice.

Anyways, good job on making graphics to complement Andrew's stuff.

[Animate This!]

Really cool.

Had me chuckling away.

I'm gonna guess that this took around 2 hours?

Tyrone's 2-frame lip-synchs actually worked pretty well, as did the zoom/pans on the 'kick-ass' bit to suggest more motion than there really was.

The drawings throughout have a beautiful energy. I like the cute drawings and the layouts of all the scenes.

My one issue with this is the buttons - the 'DBZ finish' button was a tad hard to successfully press and the later buttons before you forgive, which sorta brought it back to a previous frame if you clicked, were disconcerting.

Overall, a thoroughly chucklesome watch that is, as is your trademark, kick-ass.

Skaijo responds:

Brilliant review as always, buddy.

This animation came off mostly as a product of me practicing AS over the holiday break. It took about ten minutes to voice and an hour to animate at most. There wasn't much effort but I was so pleased with the finished product that I had to share it around.

The DBZ button deliberately needs at least 2 hits before it kicks over to the refusal as part of the joke. The other buttons such as Forgive, "..." and the others used to stop the entire animation, but at the last minute I thought it was just too much clicking necessary for an animation this short. I didn't remove the coding tho, which was certainly could have done.

Don't blame the bad lip-synching on Tyrone--as that's usually my fault. xD

[My New Grounds]

Near-perfect

The blend of animation and video was brilliantly done and is still a real novelty to see.

Thankfully it wasn't just a 'novelty' experience - the animation - for the most part - representing the world of NG and bringing your speech to life.

I love the way that you animated so many things that people might not think to - the level 6 symbol (brilliantly superimposed), the fingers, the submission, the question marks....

Technically, it was without any flaws. Animation interacted near-perfectly with yourself and the beams of light or glows worked superbly.

I realise now that the mouth being off-screen was so you could record sound seperately, but it also helps make the animation a tad more accessible - without a face there, we can relate more easily to all the parts that apply to us.

My only slight gripe was that tiny bit more humour - maybe the phone convo could have been better used - would have made it even more awesome.

Really though, this kind of technical innovation and mastery alongside fandom is exactly what NG is all about.