Lazarou's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Vision of an Auburn Night]

boring

got bored and closed it, dont know if I missed anything but it was just a crappy drawing and some red text, really didnt hold my attention for longer than 20 seconds.

[13 Halloween Tips -Tip 11]

as has been said

this isn't as good as some of the other ones. Seems a bit lazily made, very minimal animation, simple tweens etc.

remyzero responds:

now that you mentioned it, i think this one should have been released earlier. It was one that I did somewhere in the middle, so some of the earlier tips were made more recently. Thus allowing for better jokes, but with this one, i wanted to try a different style of animation, and design. Thanks!

[The Sketch Collab 07']

hmmmm

I like to be honest in my reviews. And because of that, I have to say that I didnt like it. I didnt think that any of the animations were particularly interesting, they all just seemed to be either rushed, or starved of inspiration. You can only watch a dot move around the screen (and spell words or turn into swirly lines) so many times, before it gets very old. I'm pretty sure that individually, any of the animations contained within would get blammed on the portal within minutes.

However, the execution was very nice, the music was good and the menu was cool. Those were the only good bits tho, you should really have a "minimum quality standard" for all contributing artists, so that you dont get so many cruddy animations in the next collab.

There were perhaps only 2 worthwhile artists in this collab, I am pretty sure that anyone who watches the movie can work out who those are for themselves. The others need to go back and learn how to make decent flash.

[HALO 3: the first game]

i didnt like it

very boring, a series of still images with very crappy jokes and story on them is really not worth wasting my time with. Especially when the files size is over 6MB for something which takes 30 seconds to flick through.

Don't bother making any more, please.

[CopChase]

its quite short for 4 weeks worth of work

its not bad, but pretty short. The file is very big for something of this length, have you included a lot of extra audio clips or something?

Suggestions for future movies:

- Use a REAL preloader, an image just saying "loading" is very frustrating, a nice progress bar means I know exactly how long its gonna take to load and dont sit there like a goose waiting for the play button to appear.
- The voice acting was very basic and monosyllabic. eg "Oi", "AHH!" "Uhhh!" etc, some propper dialogue or banter between characters would be more interesting.
- On that spray graffiti there were strange white edges around it, do you know about using alpha in seperate layers to produce transparency? Would probaly produce a more realistic effect.

Overall the animation and graphics were nice for a beginner, pretty basic tho with simple shapes and black outlines on everything, lots of room for improvement, but its not bad for a first try.

[Myth]

I loved, and hated it.

Whilst there is so much of me that wants to like this movie, there is so much that prevents me from doing so at the same time.

I will start with what I liked:
The hand drawn style, was very nice.
The Music was well chosen, and fitted the action perfectly. Additionally, you faded it in and out like a pro.
The story (from what I could gather from it, see below), was well thought out and planned.

What I didnt like:
- I could not understand a word you said. The voiceover just sounded like complete gibberish. I dont know if it was your accent, or the microphone, or the quality of the recording, but I just could not understand anything. Perhaps if many people had this problem, it would be worth putting subtitles into the movie, or getting someone else to do the voiceover.
- That border around the edge, whilst I can see that you are trying to create the appearence of an aged piece of parchment, it just looks like you have gone a bit mental with MSPaint. Really, please either find a better way to do that effect, or remove it, its quite distracting.
- Why go to all the trouble of hand drawing and entire world of characters and scenery, and then just plonk in the Lord of the Rings map. I couldnt actually gather from the voiceover where this was meant to be set, but to me it doesnt really seem to fit with LoTR. Just draw your own map, it would look a lot better and would fit in more with your story than seeing "MORDOR" and "THE SHIRE" scrawled across it.
- Some of the artwork was slightly spoiled by random pencil marks, or other drawings from the other side of the paper you drew it on bleeding through. This kind of spoiled the illusion. Additionally, you used lined paper to draw on, but animated it on the background that is meant to look like aged parchment. Perhaps it would be better to unify the two, either go for a lined paper look, or a parchment look, not both because it just seems strange.

Anyway, these are my comments on the movie, for when you get around to making the next part. Hope you find the criticisms useful to make your future movies even better :)

[He Has to Booboo]

nice try but:

1) Use a propper preloader (there are plenty available to dl from NG).

2) I know what a space bar looks like, I dont need a picture of one.

3) OPTIMISE YOUR DAMN AUDIO. Seriously, a 30 second cartoon should not be nearly 5 megabytes in size. Trim down your audio files to only the length needed in the movie, if you only use 10 seconds of a 3 minute song, then either trim the clip you use down, or find a shorter clip.

[Dawn of Sock]

very nice :D

Really nice animation, good music, and cool to watch.

Whilst the hand drawn images gave it a very stylised image, personally I would rather see it done in flash. If you can animate that well on paper, you should be able to animate in flash even better, with the result being clearer, sharper, and less "muddy" animations. But then of course that is down to personal preference and artistic license. If you enjoy making movies like this, then you can do what you want ;)