This was really great man! I liked the philosophical take you took on the concept. It was definitely a fascinating take on the topic.
Points for going for FBF. It may not have been the cleanest way to animate, but it made your characters lively and interesting to watch.
The audio was kinda crappy, and some of the coloring looked a little dull - but this is just nitpicking.
You should be proud man! Good luck!
Beautifully done man, you should be proud! It's an excellent take on the topic and everything looks really polished. Your use of colors truly shines. Good luck!
Thanks, man! And also thanks for being a part of the whole NATA experience, 'cause this was definitely the best year yet.
Demos shouldn't be here
If you're actually looking for advice on this, your best bet would be to post it to your dumping grounds and put the link up in the animator's forum. You'll got some decent advice there. Posting something as short as this in the portal is just asking for a bunch of reviews complaining about its length or the fact that it's stick figures.
That being said, there's not much to review here. Everything looks fine. It looks like you've got the basic concepts down. You just need to set your sights a little higher and make something a little more ambitious. I looks fine for clip that's less than 10 seconds.
It's a little stiff
When your characters are moving, everything works fine. However, there are points when your characters just stop moving in between actions. If you want them to pause, that's fine, but I'd recommend to have them wavering at least a little bit. Otherwise, it breaks up the flow of the action.
And now to point out the obvious. Since this is called a draft, I'm going to assume it's unfinished. That being said, a background and some SFX would be a serious help.
That being said, you have the beginnings of a pretty decent stick movie here. I'd recommend that you keep working on it, add some finishing touches and maybe make it a bit longer. As an experiment, you're definitely on the right track. As a final piece, you've got a bit more work to do.
thanks for the tips and shit.
i'll eventually end up finishing it but im more into non stick animating and stick fights are such a drag to make.
Pretty cool!
You've definitely got some decent style here, and the music fits really well with the atmosphere. Well done!
Your biggest problem is that you rely too heavily on tweens. They work very well in the background with the hovering ships and whatnot, but your main character often comes off as stiff and mechanical. A little more frame by frame animation would really go a long way.
Also, I'm guessing that you went through and animated this chronologically. I may be wrong, but the animation becomes more detailed as the cartoon goes along and it feels a little inconsistent. If you don't want to go back and update the earlier parts of your work as you go along, I recommend that you animate your scenes out of order. It makes everything feel a little more cohesive. Any animator gets better and better as time goes along, particularly if they're familiarizing themselves with a new program, and it's only natural that their work will get better as they progress.
As far as your audio problems go, try putting the audio inside of movie clips, That should help sync everything up for you.
Otherwise, I look forward to future episodes of memory. Well done!
Very cool!
That was far cooler than I expected it to be. You took a neat concept and really pushed it to it's extreme. Well done. The pacing works out, the story is fun, the animation works and looks pretty good and the music works well to bring the piece together.
A few suggestions.
The two biggest things you're going to be judged on in animation are your faces and hands. In this, the faces work well enough although they are a bit simple. Don't forget about the hands though. Often they are fine, but there are a few points where the hands become blobs or simply don't have enough detail. What you did worked well enough, but if you really want to knock people's socks off, I'd recommend putting in that little extra effort.
Besides that, the best piece of advice I can give you is about the ending. Since it seems like your character was hand drawn and not layered much, you might have considered leaving his innards blank rather than filling them with white. If you could find a way to fade in the paper texture in the background and just have his lines, without any fills, it would look a little bit more natural.
But seriously, these are minor flaws, nitpicking if you will. You should be proud of this, and I look forward to seeing more of your work. Well done!
Pretty damn good!
This is a funny short. It's well produced and the animation is decent. It's got a few flaws, but overall this short is well done.
My first recommendation to you is to add a little bit more in-betweening. You're pretty good at covering up that your characters occasionally just jump from one key pose to the next, but there are a few points where your animation would definitely benefit from a little more time and effort. It's far more problematic at the beginning of the short, particularly in the faces of the father and son where occasionally they will just jump from one face to the next with few, if any frames in between.
Some of your in-betweens are running at too low a frame rate as well. The biggest offender is when the drunk is waving his arms at the child, and it looks incredibly choppy. A little bit of tweening or just turning the arm on the frame between will make things more fluid.
As a side note: in the shot mentioned above, the drunk's head is on a higher layer than his arms. This makes it look as though somehow his arms are waving behind his head but in front of his body. Moving the arms to a higher layer than the head really wouldn't take you too much time and would look far less sloppy.
Lastly, some of your backgrounds are a bit bland, particularly the ones where the camera is pulled out. A little extra detail can go a long way. Specifically, I'd point to the bar scene, where the father is storming towards his son. The environment is rather bland, and a little bit of punching up would not only make it far more interesting, but it would push home your point a little further. There's a dartboard in the background, but maybe you could add some pictures of sad, drunk looking people or famous alcoholics or something. Advertisements for cheap beer and other skeevy adornments on the wall would really push home how gross this bar is. You could add some cracks to the walls, or some mice or something. Maybe you could add a passed out guy in the corner, or a broken window. Things like that can make a big difference.
But overall this is a well animated short. The timing is good, the writing is original and most importantly, it's funny. Good luck on your next cartoon.
Not bad for a first
Well done for your first Flash!
Your main character is interesting enough visually, your animation is clean and relatively lively considering how little is going on. Your backgrounds are also very well done.
Here's a few tips to help you with your future work:
Number one, include music, sfx, something. It's not too tough to put a little bit of music in the background and it makes a piece far more interesting. Trust me when I tell you that many animators make this mistake on their first piece (myself included), but it'll help.
Since I'm pointing out the obvious, I might as well add that you should add a little more complex plot to the next one. This is just an animation exercise, I realize that, but I couldn't help but add that.
Your walk is pretty well done. There's a lot of bounce to it. and for a walk that is so heavily tweened, it has a decent amount of weight to it. Since it makes up such a large portion of your piece, I'd recommend putting as much detail into that walk as physically possible. The best piece of advice I can give you is to have his wrists swing a little bit. You might even want to do some shape tweening on the feet and have them band around the arch a bit, it'll help give them more weight. The legs are well done, but much of the upper body could use a bit more detail.
Observe base jumpers a little more closely. You'll notice that when they jump, they don't usually manage to keep their feet below them. I'm not saying your jumper should be out of control or anything, but I'd like to see a little something more than just a flesh toned circle for a head.
Lastly, I'd like to see a bit more emotion in this guy. He just looks like a kinda angry Charlie Brown. I would think he should be a bit more excited, nervous, ramped up or something approaching the jump. It's not too hard to tween eyebrows and a mouth, and it would add a lot of character to the piece. When he stands at the edge of the cliff, he could take a deep breath in preparation or something. Little quirks add a lot of character.
Anyway, well done. For a first flash, this is an impressive offering and you should be proud of it. Good luck on your next animation!
Well done!
This flash is very entertaining, I can only think of a few ways that you could improve it.
Your biggest problem is a low frame rate. At some points it works fine, especially when you use it to your advantage, but the problem is that there are often points in the animation where it looks as though a little more inbetweening would help clean things up a bit. When there's a lot of movement in a shot, it's far less noticeable, but there are a few areas that look like they would have benefited from a little more attention (for example the shot in which the guy is walking towards the camera while talking on a cell phone).
Another way to make your animation look a bit more fluid is to use easing and/or anticipation and follow-through. The problem is that things look kind of stiff occasionally. This is most evident in shots in which people are turning their heads or changing expressions. It looks like you use easing and follow through when you're tweening, but don't forget to use it when you're doing a bit of FBF. It'll make things look a bit less stiff.
As far as anticipation and follow through go: when the guy goes into the flying jump kick for example, you could have him crouch first, or rear back or something. Just showing him flying through the air feels a bit choppy. When the car hits the tack, it's fine, but I want to feel how guickly that car is stopping. Have it rear up a bit when it stops, maybe going up on two wheels before bouncing back down.
But alas, these are relatively minor complaints. The music works well with the visuals and the cartoon looks pretty damn good despite all my nitpicking. You effectively portrayed your subject matter in an interesting and original way and it's a lot of fun to watch. Well done and good luck on your next project!
The framerate indeed sucks at times. I especially think so when I animated the camera to spin around and go above the both of them. I'll be honest here; I got lazy. I also had a lot of trouble when I tried getting the perspectives of their faces right when I was working with the onionskins.
I also think you are right about my animation being quite stiff. Personally it never bothered me much, but yeah. Now that you've mentioned it I definitely see room for improvement! This is perhaps the most useful advice that you've given me in this review. Frame by Frame animation needs to be smoothed out aswel.
I also agree about the jump action. It's a simple bit of animation that could've fit right in. Now that you mention it, I really wonder why I left it out, lol. I remember having some major problems with the slipping car animation, which I think is easy to spot. It's a nice tip you gave me here, I should give the law of physics a bit more attention to bring more life into my animations.
That's a great review! Thanks, I agree and I'll be sure to use this advice in future animations! Quite usefull indeed! :3
Not bad for a first flash
Alright, this isn't bad for a first attempt.
The animation quality varies from shot to shot. Although things generally look pretty clean, the illusion of life is often missing. Adding in little details will probably help make hour characters feel a bit more real. A blink here or there, a nose scratch... something. Take a look at Don Hertzfeld's work for an example of how to make simplistic figures a little more life like.
One spot in particular that could use some work is when the woman starts eating the guy. I know that if some woman was attempting to bite a few hunks of flesh off of me, I'd probably react. This dude just sits there. You could have some fun with it. Have him running around the house while she takes bites out of him. Maybe she tries to take a nibble while he's asleep. You could have her slowly work up to it, first kissing him, then biting slightly; and he's getting a little excited; then she moves down his neck and goes for the jugular and he runs around screaming and bleeding until he dies, and she eats him. Don't just have him stand there though, it's simply not that interesting to watch and just a bit off putting.
I also think you should push your joke further. I get what you're trying to get at, but you need to develop the concept a little bit further. If you want to focus on the birth, you could do some funny fetal shots of the child. If you want to focus on the child, you could have a couple scenes of it growing up. Maybe it plays in the park, or goes to school (I could see a piece of it dropping off onto a test). Hell, you could have it playing in the road and getting smashed by a car, that'd be pretty funny. At this point it just comes off as strange without any real punchline.
You might want to add a bit more color into the backgrounds. Even adding a light gradient from gray to white would help. Just leaving a white background generally just comes off as being lazy. Adding a couple details might help too, but you can still keep it simple and make it work, you just need to toy around with it.
You may also want to think about adding a bit of ambient noise. It's particularly noticeable at the beginning, when they're just hanging on the couch doing nothing and suddenly decide to make out. Maybe a TV could be on in the background or something, but just having them sit there not speaking on the couch and randomly having them make out just doesn't work that well.
For the record, a suppository is a pill that is inserted into the rectum, it doesn't make someone go to the bathroom. What you're thinking of is a laxative.
Lastly, you may want to add a few more jokes to your next cartoon. This work, while it does show creativity and some invention, simply isn't that funny. It's mostly just gross, and while shock/toilet humor can be very funny, you need to actually make a joke to make it work. This particular joke has been done before more or less (take a look at the Ren and Stimpy cartoon "Stimpy's Son" or the more recent "Stimpy's Pregnant" or a multitude of South Park episodes including anything with Mr. Hankey or the episode "More Crap" etc...). Don't assume that people are going to laugh just because a piece of turd is on the screen.
But, for a first effort, you could have done far worse. Good luck with your next cartoon!
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