blarg1's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Alien Report Part IV]

art is primitive - storyline and animation good

I thought the story concept and overall atmosphere of this piece were good. The animation was quite sophisticated and reasonably polished, if a little rough.

Your choice of camera angles and storyboarding were excellent.

However, one thing that really grated was the increadibly poor English. If English is not your first language, you should get a translator, or a friend with better fluency to check over the script with you before you begin production. This really detracts from the overall presentation.

[29 Day War]

Why the fuss?

Aside from the fact that the author has obviously watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and identifies with the half-baked silliness therin, there seems little to recommend this animation.

I thought the audio was really well done, and the pacing was good, but the animation was wooden and the art was a tad on the primitive side.

The message was neither particularily profound, nor true, nor wise.

[Dog V.S Satan]

No, I don't think NG viewers did overlook anything

This is neither very funny nor very good. It is passable, no more.

["The Fall"]

Bllllphtttt!

Technically competant, but that self-pity party deserves a ripe strawberry (clock).

[JaKe and SaKura Intro]

creepy

the art and animation need a little work - the unitended effect here is generally creepy

[Shells over Vietnam:Part1]

Needs work

The music was cliché, and didn't work with the subject, and the art was priitive.

I know this may seem mean, but when dramatising combat, you should try to show the weapons actually used in that war.

I'm pretty sure that there were no Sea Kings in Vietnam, and the grenade was wrong, the Vietcong uniform was wrong, the American uniforms were wrong, and the rifle was wrong.

Don't let this get you down - the Vietnam war is an interesting subject for an animation. You just need to do a little research before digging into a subject this big.

[Nimpy_Poo: Final]

You are teh banned?

How about "you are teh blammed"/

NimpyPoo-1 responds:

why dont you love me???

[COG: The Village]

a cute little short

I likes the business with the old hag who kept trying to touch the protagonist.

[Star Wars: Dubbed! Part 1]

redubs are of limited interest

There isn't much humour to be derived from an audio overdub.

If you are going to create one, you should make certain of three things:

1) make sur eyou have the legal right to alter and publish the video you use

2) make sure the audio is of good quality and is uniformly audible, (certainly not the case here)

3) when compressing video for Flash playback on a computer, make certain you de-interlace it first.

[Ghostbusters: Episode 2]

very impressive... but I have some suggestions

I really enjoyed this. The storyline was simple, but engaging enough for the duration of the short. The dialogue was crisp and enjoyable.

However, there are a couple of things that should be improved:

1) the beiggest flaw in this production was the sound quality. It was often muffled, suggesting that the recording levels were above the acceptable range most of the time - and there were a lot of sibilants and pops. You should record your voices through a sound board and monitor your levels. I also recommend using a breath guard during recording.

Once you have your sound down, you should equalize your levels to avoid having some characters' voices louder than others, (as happened here). Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge is an excellent tool for audio production.

2) The lip synch was very lazy, and ended up being quite distracting. You can use a two-frame mouth animation for short bursts of dialogue and long shots, but it looks silly on close ups or medium close-ups - especially if you have a talking head delivering a lot of expository dialogue, (as in Egon's speech in the ambulance).

If you look around, you should be able to find resources that will help you animate talking heads more convincingly without having to do a lot of work. Basically, you create a movie clip of the mouth with the 6 major phonemes, and then use a frame action on the timeline that includes the dialogue recording to cause the mouth clip to jump to the appropriate phoneme in synch with the audio.

The process of cutting up your dialogue for mouth movements is called creating a "dope sheet". If you search on that, you should be able to find some useful resources.

I think that by addressing these two things, you could take your work from engaging to mind blowing with surprisingly little effort.

I hope this helps.

I hope this helps.