ChrisMckiernan's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Santa's Little Secret]

Its kind of short.
It was kind of funny, but not really.

The flash animation was good.

[DIG DUG IN MARIO WORLD]

The animation and designs were ok.

But the story, dialogue, and voice acting was amazing and hilarious.

Thank you for making me laugh.

[Trevor Something- In My System (Animated Music Video)]

The character designs were really weird.

The music went really well with the trippy, 1980's retro vibe.

This was interesting to watch.

[Earth]

Great choice of music!
Good animation and it was really funny.

I enjoyed this.

[Bamboo Garden- Ep. 1]

Good characters designs, backgrounds, animation and voice acting.

But,
You really have to work on timing your scenes and the timing of the dialogue and lip sync.

Each scene or camera angle was about 1-2 seconds long.
It was making me dizzy and cross eyed trying to follow everything.

It was hard to tell where the characters were in the scene and where they fit tin the background.

It also looked like you used the same split second scene repeatedly to add more time or length to your animated short.

The story was confusing and hard to follow.
When your making a story you have to constantly ask the question "why?"

Why do the characters act or think the way they do?
Why are they stealing from each other and for what purpose?
Where do they live and why do they live there?
Why do they fight, train, and live the way they do?

My advice is....

1.Your entire short was "quick cut" and "zoom" camera angles.
Have less "quick cuts" and have longer timed scenes. Maybe 5 to 10 seconds long.
Its up to you
and the length of the scenes should be judged by whats happening in the story.

2. With some of the lip sync, i noticed that dialogue timing was off by at least 1 second or half a
second and i noticed some "shuttering" with the main character's lip sync.

3. Work on your humor and jokes. They were cliche and under developed.

This has great potential if you fix what I had stated above.

Joshuanimations responds:

Thanks for taking the time to watch it, and thanks for the feedback! Yea I actually agree with a lot of the points you made haha, I made the mistake of animating the entire thing before the voice acting so it was difficult to later on try to sync it up haha but yea I do agree with you on the timing issues too and also yea plenty of cliche underdeveloped jokes, when I wrote it and animated it I literally had no idea what a cliche even was haha I was like fresh out of the water, it was later after I had finished so much of the project and started looking at movies and shows differently that I realized I was using a bit too many cliches and not developing them better, but yea even I myself felt that this project is overall kind of odd and not the best, but yea a lot of it has to do with the points you made, thanks for the feedback!

[T E T R I S ' D 4]

There was pretty much no detail and just gradients and flat colors.

This entire animation was monotonous and boring.

Even the choice of background music was putting me to sleep.

KobraEditing responds:

Well a lot of work went into both the music and the animation. The style has been the same since the beginning and it is meant to represent the drab and desolate world that had been created. I couldn't suddenly change it to be bright and colorful this time around, nor would I. It's unfortunate that you didn't care for it.

[Battle of the Butchers]

Really great 2D animation.
I can see every pencil stroke in each second (frame) of animation.

I really liked the character, designs, and the story was easy to follow.

I also liked the "Old 1900-1920's" scratched film effect.
It enhanced the vibe and personality of the animation.

The fact that there was no dialogue in the animated short also complimented the "Old 1900-1920's" vibe and fits in well with everything else.

My only gripe,
was that I wished some of the backgrounds were as detailed as the characters but they were still good.

[Epic Fight]

Good Animation but not great.
It didn't look very fluid at some parts, probably because of the program you used to make this.

This wasn't very epic for me.

h-hakim responds:

Nah, its not the program. Its just i m too lazy to fix it.

[Mexicoke]

The animation and designs are ok.

I couldn't tell if the main character was a man or a woman.

The audio wasn't very clear at some parts.

[Enojón]

I like the expressive animation style.

This reminds me of the stuff I use to watch for inspiration a long time ago, when I first got interested in animation.