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Sheizenhammer

15 Movie Reviews

6 w/ Responses

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Watching this on it's own, I was gonna call you out on just submitting an ad to Newgrounds. On it's own, this is little better than the generic 'ZTV News' flashes which are really just a dressed-up showcase of other things to come (that the developer expects us to pay for). However, I decided to give you the benefit of the doubt thanks to all of your earlier work on Brackenwood - I, like so many others, remember the series fondly - and read up on the backstory as to what you've been doing for the last 6.5 years since the last Bitey animation.

I'm very glad I did that before writing this. It's a sad fact of many a good animator's life that the better they are, the more they get worked to death and expected to like it by employers who have no interest in seeing said animator's own ideas and dreams come to fruition... somewhat ruining the whole point of getting into creative animation, IMO. After all that has happened to you and Bitey, I don't blame you at all for releasing this: Sometimes genuine creators and artists need a little help to get things back on track and to gauge reactions to restarted ideas, instead of shamelessly grabbing for more money like most other ads do. It's genuinely refreshing to know that one of my old favourite NG animators still fits into the former category.

The animation itself was a little odd, but I can see the reasoning for it. Personally, I think it looks better doing everything FBF (as you've previously proven, you have the skill to pull it off beautifully), but I'm also aware of how much work slo-mo' scenes are. If it were my animation, I'd do them as FBF nonetheless, but cut them to short action-shots: Maybe 1 or 2 seconds each just to emphasise particular bits instead of a whole scene. It'd make the work involved less of a nightmare, and wouldn't make it all look like it suddenly drops a quality setting when the slo-mo' bit happens. And yes, I noticed the hair and witch cape. As a matter of fact, Bitey's mostly FBF hair against his mostly morphed / tweened body was largely what made the non-FBF bits stick out for all the wrong reasons (This is where the less-than-perfect score comes from, as I'm supposed to be reviewing only this flash and not the whole series with that rating).

Please, please, please use the money you get from this as wisely as you can, and for god's sake don't overstretch yourself. You don't need anyone to tell you how quickly what looks like a lot of funding can disappear overnight, after what's already happened. However, the fact that you're willing to give it another go even at this point is encouraging, and I'm sure I speak for almost everyone watching this when I say: You have the full support of your fans here. And there are a lot of fans still left here (as they've already proved in their deluge of positive reviews before me). Many have raved in the past about the staggering beauty of the Brackenwood series, or the smoothness of the FBF, or even the sound and musical backgrounds that accompany it, and cite them as reasons why this is the "best series ever", but in this rambling monologue-r's opinion, that's not what makes it such a good series. You can have all of the aforementioned and still be forgotten, as many before and after you have been. What you have here isn't beauty or smoothness or musical aptitude or professional quality; you've captured something altogether more brilliant in your combination of it all:

Timelessness.

Kudos for FINALLY doing something remotely different with this series, but... seriously? This is like a minute long at most. What the hell have you been doing all this time?

The length isn't the only problem I have with this, either. Going back to the 'something different' comment: Yes, I'm glad this wasn't just another 3 minutes of the same mindless shooting animations we've all been watching for the last 11 years, but the only thing that was completely new looked like it had been drawn in the space of 30 seconds, with your eyes shut. A creepy face and a few black lines for tentacles? Wow, that's original... : /

I know you can do better than this. Tricky Madness 2 was way better at being scary, and didn't even use any unique artwork either. Compared to what you've already done previously, this looks more like something you just threw together to keep the 12 year old fans amused instead of actually putting effort into expanding the series and making something we could all have enjoyed.

I'm pretty sure one of the submission rules says something like: "Your movie must not simply be an ad for your site", which makes this pretty ironic, all things considered.

...OK, yes, this IS more than just a site advert... but only just. It's a solid flash in itself: It's very pretty, well animated, and the voices are good, but I simply don't see the point in making an entire flash movie to convey news about a website that you can just as easily make a newspost about.

Think about it. The more time you spend on making the promo movies, the longer it's going to take you to actually make the stuff you're talking about here, which somewhat defeats the point of advertising things that are "coming soon". If you spend all your time on this series, they're not going to come soon, are they.

So, what's left apart from the promo stuff? The humour... which is so forced (and similar to the last episode) it just isn't funny at all. If I wanted to watch emo bitching, I'd go to the Newgrounds forums.
Now yes, humour is a matter of taste, and I'm guessing this was made to appeal to the same demographic that the hentai flashes were (read: teenagers), and reading the reviews left on it already I can see you've had at least some success in making your target audience laugh. However, the fact that it only appears entertaining to said target audience is itself a weak point in this series' execution. The best examples of comedy appeal to virtually everyone, regardless of age, gender, race etc.

So, the humour is apparently self-limiting and the rest of it is counter-productive. So what's the point? I bet your blog gets hundreds if not thousands of hits a day, and your website is just as popular if not more, so you could just as easily have posted a blog on both and got the message out to as many people as this did, using a tiny percentage of the time and effort this did. If there's an aspect to this I've overlooked, please say so, because I'm really scratching my head for reasons why you're doing these here.

"Remember, you're submitting a REVIEW for this CONTENT."
....It's amazing how many people here don't even read that far down the page these days. : /

Anyway, I love you for this. I've been wanting to strangle some of the "reviewers" on here for years now, and the removal of a summary box in the latest redesign only makes it possible to post even shorter and less meaningful drivel than before.

Message aside, there is one thing I don't get about this movie itself. The animation is good, I'll give you that, but... why's it 18.4MB in size? I was expecting something at least a couple of minutes long for the animation / sound quality this has. It may have something to do with the fact that it's in an MP4 format (or so the title claims anyway), but I've seen .swf files that have this quality of sound / graphics last a lot longer and have a smaller file size, so (if it was originally done with Flash) why convert it?

Of course, if it wasn't made in a program that does .swf exporting, then the filesize is fair enough, but even so I would've liked to see / hear you really tear into some of those braindead comments. I'd gladly wait for a much larger file to load if it's full of swearing and ranting at mindless YouTube idiots on Newgrounds. Maybe that can be the content of the inevitable sequel when said braindead commenters don't get the message this time? >:D

Dunso responds:

It's not an Mp4 haha, I'm shitty at anything beyond hitting ctrl+enter when it comes to exporting so I don't quite know what it is. I do have some heavy use of filters on bitmaps and stuff inverting and moving and such.

I generally hate hentai submissions...

...And yet, I don't hate this. In fact, I kinda like it!

Most of the NG submissions that focus on naked women are just generic slideshows of hentai, pulled from Google. Seeing something that has actually been drawn by the same person who uploaded it is genuinely refreshing, and that alone is worth a few points here.

Better yet, the animation is some of the highest quality FBF I've seen in a while. This really does look lifelike in its movements. You've obviously put a lot of effort into making this look good, and for that I can only applaud your efforts to make something more than just a contrived fap session.

However, while those aspects of the flash are very good, it's completely lacking in almost everything else. I know this was supposed to be more of a demo than a full flash, but that doesn't really make the simplicity of it any less obvious. No sound, no interactivity to speak of, and let's face it: as good as this is, it IS still just a 3-second loop whose only good feature (indeed its only feature at all) is the animation quality.

Still, that alone is worth a half-decent score at least, so that's exactly what it's getting (I wish there was a '6.5' button, but meh; there isn't). This is one hentai series I actually WOULD like to see more of (as long as it's not just about gratuitous tits, that is). If this one is anything to go by, any reviews for future Ucogi flashes from me will only get better scores as more stuff gets added.

MAEK MOAR! :P

Veinom responds:

I completely agree with you in everythng. I dont like hentai games or slideshows. They are boring, generic and repetitive. And they got bad animation. When I do something I like it to have some originality and differ from the mass. I want to make a game with her and I really dont want it to be another pointless hentai game. If you got any ideas about what the game should look like please share them with me, and i can guarantee you WILL see more of her when I get some free time from work.

You're not doing your own tutorial any favours.

Kudos for trying, but there are a few very large and obvious problems with this:

The quality isn't just bad, it's hopeless. The things you're doing are totally illegible thanks to the low resolution of the video (and the sound isn't much better - I've got my speakers turned right up and I still can't hear it clearly). Since I'm guessing you used you're own way of importing videos here, you're not exactly selling the method very well.

Also, there's the filesize. 7.4 MB, and for what? If this is what importing videos results in (read: a whole lot of nothing), why bother importing videos like this at all?

...For that matter, there's an air of pointlessness about the whole thing in general. All you're really doing here (I think) is clicking a button that says 'Import...' and following the on-screen prompts. Gee, I'd never have thought of doing that if I wanted to import a video into flash. :/

If you want to make tutorial flashes, it's crucial that you actually know more than most about Flash to start with, and making sure you're not just pointing out the blaringly obvious (or what's been pointed out a million times already in previous tutorial flashes) is also important. It's nice to see someone use the 'import' tool for something other than stealing YouTube videos for a change, but at the same time, just drawing / animating the same thing would've worked a lot better than this did.

skeleme responds:

It file size was huge because of the tut vid that I had to import and the quality was bad because i had to resize it a little!!!

Mesmerising...

I don't see how anyone would find this "boring". It was perfectly done as well as very relaxing to watch.

While I don't normally like crediting flash authors for music they didn't make, you certainly found the right track to use in this. I've never heard something so easy to listen to in a flash before. I wish I could find music this good more often...

As for the animation, it's perfect. The star twinkles / headphone lights sync up perfectly with the music, and even after leaving it loop around for 20 times (yes, it really is that fascinating) it still syncs up well. That's better than most music video flashes by a long way. And that's not even making any mention of the simple yet clever background animations (which were, again, brilliant).

One thing I like in particular is the grainy filter over all of it. It's rare to see filters like that over flashes, and that gives it a kind of uniqueness to add to the already striking animation, without detracting on the enticing subtlety that makes you keep watching it.

There is only one thing I can find wrong with it: the preloader doesn't appear to work very well. It seems to go straight to the 'play' button without letting it load properly, which can cause blank screens to appear if you hit it too early.

Still, it's not a very big file (I'm never going to be staring at a blank screen for long, premature button-pushing or not), and once loaded it's as good as a music video can reasonably get, so it's worth a good score at any rate. Favorited!

(Also, for some reason it seems to take a lot more CPU effort to use that starry picture as a background, which can slow down the animation at times and occasionally mess up the syncing. Then again, that's probably just my crappy computer, so I'm gonna ignore it for the purposes of this review. Just thought it was worth mentioning in case others were having problems with it too.)

I'm genuinely confused.

Why, oh why, do you do this?

I'm not gonna complain about the flash (you know as well as I do why it's getting a low score), but after seeing so many of these things I have to ask: why don't you put the comments IN the flash? You know, make some simple comic strip / slide show out of the text instead of writing it in the author comments and just throwing a random pile of garbage in the .swf file as filler?

I ask because it would take LESS effort to do than what these things currently involve, and you'd likely get BETTER scores for it. All you'd have to do is copy / paste the text you write in the comments box into a few frames, and draw some simple pictures to go with the story (which actually isn't too bad, all things considered). Add a couple of back / forward buttons to go between the frames, and you're done.

After you've got the first one done, all you'd have to do for each new one is change the text to whatever you were gonna write in the comments anyway. Ergo, once you've done one (which would take the bare minimum of work in the first place), you'd have to do practically nothing besides what you do anyway (i.e. write a half-assed story).

I know you probably won't listen to this, but given the fact that the only redeeming feature in your flashes currently is the preloader / intro screen, it was worth a shot. As the intro screen proves, you CAN draw and animate worth a shit; it wouldn't be hard at all for you to do any of the above.

Just consider it, m'kay? No? Ah, whatever; I tried. :/

Lolwut?

I'm sorry... I had to...

This is great for a stickman movie. But then again, I would think that....

Anyway, it'd be good if all the parts had sound effects (the silent ones just aren't as entertaining without all the splattering noises), and of course the animations were pretty simplistic, as per usual for this kind of movie. There are ways of making a stickman flash look more professional, but then again that kind of detracts from the fun of these things (most of the time they're funny BECAUSE they're so simple).

Still, there's a fine line between humourously simple and lazy, and you managed to get it right here, so I like it. I gave it a 4 vote, because there is room for improvement, but it's pretty good as it is all the same. Good job; kudos to everyone who made it. :)

Fizzled responds:

everyone (NEARLY EVERYONE) used sound effects, apart from mack. and someone else. but that's it really. and thank you very much for the honest feedback, i appreciate it much more than the guys who give it a 2 becuase 'it sux'

Um... random much?

I never would've guessed that I'd be starting my day by watching a velociraptor go on a chainsaw massacre. Guess you really CAN find anything on Newgrounds.

The randomness alone was a plus point; this is original even by NG standards. However, there were a few obvious areas that could've done with improvement, most notably the use of such a badly cropped, static image of the raptor. Judging from the rest of the artwork, you could've probably drawn a chainsaw-wielding raptor and it would've looked better than what I'm guessing was the 'easy' option of the static picture. You could've animated a drawn one much better as well.

Aside from that, it was actually pretty good (especially if this is your first flash). The animations of all the drawn stuff were good, as well as the drawings themselves. The voices were spot on and true to character, and the only things wrong with the rest of it were the fact that it was a bit short, and could've involved more gory animation details.

Still, all these little things add up, so it's far from perfect. For a first flash, though (one that doesn't rely on sprite sheets and is over 5MB in size just because the latest Linkin Park track was thrown in it for no good reason), it's definitely one of the better ones I've seen. Keep at it! With practice, you could make some amazing stuff!

DrSevenSeizeMD responds:

hahaha thanks. It was my first real flash. I have a few super short ones which didn't really require any animations. Not animating the velociraptor was part of our inside joke. I can crop him better for future flashes, but you're right that animating him would look better. I appreciate all the advice and will use it for future work. Thanks for the review.

If you find me ignorant, enlighten me.

Age 36, Male

Zzzzzz...

Yarm, UK

Joined on 12/31/08

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