Bezman's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[The Fairy Future Mother]

he graphical quality does mar it

I'm no script-writer, but that script seemed pretty cool. It was entertaining at any rate!

I love the idea of a 'Fairy Ghost Mother' and liked her surly attitude. Maybe you could have played that up even more - taken it further into a cartoonish extreme?

I think the main reason why it didn't do as well as you hoped was because of the graphical qualities. Within all 3 fields - design, drawing and animation - there are shortcomings that detract slightly from the quality. I'll try and give an example of each.

1st frame - the design of the first frame will usually be seen for longer than any other, so try and make it well designed!

On this screen, the most prominent feature is the newgrounds preloader, whereas I feel it should be the title. Instead, the title is of a similar colour to parts of its background (the pinkish wall) and appears low-contrast and hard to read as a result. Typically, it's best to set text against either a solid colour or a low-contrast background - here, if you deleted the wall/windowframe and the stars behind the text, that'd be a step in the right direction.

The star looks cool, but maybe it could be integrated more - say by being the dot of the 'i'? Maybe enlarge the text, giving it two lines at least, and space to breathe? Why is the NG logo/play button the largest element? I'm all for bigging up the site, but it seems incongruous with the graphical quality of everything else. Rather than having the text/pictures and play button as seperate elements grafted onto each other, you need to think of a few ways to lay them out together then assemble it so they each become part of a greater whole.

Animation - you obviously do a lot of tweening in your animation, whilst keeping many layers static. I'd suggest using a few more poses - in the starting argument, for example, it seems unnatural for everyone to be standing so rigidly - even just 'snapping' to a new pose - leaning forwards, hand on hip etc. - would be a step in the right direction. When you're animating, take a moment to 'act' that section, then think about how your body moves.

Drawing - the leg/torso proportions really do look kinda bad. Legs should be far longer and it looks like a mistake rather than a stylistic choice. Work on your hands. Think about removing black outlines in the background or altogether. Make your lines nicer curves rather than being so 'rigid'. Think about the colouring of everything. My tips here are to practise sketching people - maybe on the underground, or anytime you're sitting, doing little and people are nearby. Think about colours more.

A lot of this will come through practise, but I hope I've helped prod you in the right direction.

Now for some more things I liked -
The wallpaper in the starting scene was an awesome texture. Where did you pick it up from?

The voices were all generally well-acted and clear to understand.

The scene with the dancing, changing colours and animated crowd looked cool. Maybe another line of people (a slightl different colour of course) would have made it shine even more but it looks great as is.

I liked the fact that you bothered to do shading for most of it.

It was fun to watch and a good piece, but the graphical quality does mar it slightly and will greatly affect its score.

OxSox responds:

Bezman your reviews are the greatest. If I could be half as good of an artist as you are a reviewer, I'd be happy. Next time I make an animation I'm going to look this review over many times as I do my work. Thank you.

[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.