Rammer's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[French Revolution Project]

ah, i remember making school projects in flash.

i made my first one back in 8th grade, i think. it was a short movie depicting a part of Stephen King's "The Green Mile." ah, i miss those days.

i'm sure this was fun for you to make, but i don't think it belongs on the flash portal. sorry, buckaroo. have fun making more flash projects for school in the future, though!

[Fulpitude]

:U text

the "too much frame-by-frame required" bit actually made me laugh. as usual from you, lulu, excellent work. i also lol'd at the juicy-juice thing. :P

i see that you did half of this, too, Zach, but your art style doesn't pop out to me like Luis' does. i'm assuming you did the first half of the movie though. the point is, it all looked consistently good, so good job :3

[Tracks]

trite, but otherwise not bad.

artistically-speaking, this movie is decent. nothing stands out as incredible, but nothing stands out as awful either. the animation, aside from tweens, could've used some work. are you using onion skinning? it's a very helpful tool that helps you keep track of what your previous frames looked like. the tear drop in particular could've used some work; it looked like a viscous blob rather than a droplet of water.

moving onto the subject matter, it just seemed cliché. i get that it's a depressing flash, but the kid sitting in a corner crying? come on, you could've probably thought of a more creative way to represent depression. the bleeding wrists seemed out-of-place, as did the person laying in the grass. the movie seemed cohesive at first but after the wrist bit, it just seemed to jump around in time and i actually got confused.

maybe i'm thinking too deeply into this. but anyway, i gave you a 3. the movie isn't bad, but certain parts of it like the frame-by-frame animation and the story could be improved.

demsis responds:

Yeah I know what you mean... about the, well the lack of regular frame-by-frame animation. At the time when the majority of this video was made, I probably compensated for the lack of frame-by-frame skills by using tweens. Obviously the droplet of water is one of the worst animations.

As for the subject matter; I agree with you. I can see how in some ways I almost find seeing this boring, because the creativity is bland and the story - abstract. And a lot of the scenes were fairly cheap so I just mass deleted them, most of the scenes were cheap.

Next time (if there is one), there's going to be a proper story, and a decent one too. For the past while I realise that it's much better to spend ages thinking of a good story and then animating it rather than jumping into an animation without a story.

Thanks for your helpful review!

[Epically Huge]

i...i don't know what i just watched, but...

i loved every second of it, and after watching that new nin10doh movie, this was twice as funny in comparison.

[Shamoozal: GFGames #4]

way too short.

you are a great artist, and a great animator. but you have a problem regarding the length of these shorts, in that they are way too short. they are the Daisy Dukes of short cartoons. people aren't on the edge of their seat waiting for the next Shamoozal cartoon to come out, and if they care at all about these movies you make, they will wait longer than four days for something that is longer and higher quality. everything else you have is top-notch - your characters are memorable, you're a good writer, the voice-acting you have is good (when it's present, anyway :P). you just need to work more on the length.

also, how can you get more HD than vectors? HD video is one thing, but nothing will ever beat the clarity and sharpness of vector art.

Shamoozal responds:

Thank you for the comments, but I won't lie that its a slight bummer to see a low score just because of the length of the short.

You're probably right, we don't have as large an audience around here as some other artists and we've been doing this thing for 3 years now. I honestly don't think the problem is the length of the shorts though. Based on ratings alone, our longest short, Crapfest Force, has less views and a lower score than GFG1 and GFG2. Both of those shorts together probably aren't the length of Crapfest Force. I think my main problem is that I don't get enough of these out quick enough. If I did, maybe things would be different.

So anyway, the reason our shorts are so Daisy Duke-like, comes down to a lot of things. Time is number one. I work a real 40 hour a week job that isn't this stuff, I come home and I need to make time for "home" things like spending time with my wife, cleaning my house up, and doing what ever other human has to do when they get to a certain age. Shamoozal, unfortunately, is not my money ticket. I do it part time, for fun! Shamoozal is done out of my own passion, and when I have time for it. When these shorts are put together, lots of time and effort go into these things. A lot of people were surprised to find during the live stream how much time is just spend on doing clean up alone. I just so happened to have an extremely busy summer and no work was done on the shorts as a result. I was able to do this in a few days because I had already boarded and did an animatic for it, I knew the amount of work that needed to be done and I had time. It may have been "only" four days, but I barely left my computer. The dedication was still there.

So yeah, thats why they're short. And come on, I essentially matched this short to a piece of music, how could I really make it any longer, you know?

As for the HD versions, what I mean by those is that you can download them and store them onto your Xbox or PS3 and watch them on an HDTV. They're uncompressed video files, and they look great. You're only seeing these shorts at half of their size, but we work on these shorts at 720p. It's just an bonus for anyone who is interested.

Anyway, thanks for the comments.

[Learn to Vote Responsibly]

terrible cartoon with an equally dumb message

i'm not even going to mention the fact that popular vote counts for nothing (even the last review by FireSoCold pointed this out, so i'm sure many others have, too), so i'm just going to rag on how sloppily this was made.

it's pretty obvious that you put next to no effort into this. there's no real animation, so there's no excuse whatsoever to have not drawn some decent-looking characters. their lip sync was horrible! did you even bother with it? the smarmy guy just repeated the same 2 mouth movements throughout the entire movie, and what was with the hick's mouth? you actually shape-tweened it? you're pathetic. take some time and actually draw it out instead of half-assing it.

everything about this sucked, except for the smarmy guy's voice acting. that was pretty ok, but the redneck's voice acting was terrible. he was too quiet and had no emotion whatsoever in his voice. did you even listen to it, or did you just throw in the sound file and assume that it would be ok? did you even listen to your movie before you submitted? jesus christ.

maybe if your art, animation, voice acting, and political message didn't blow so bad, you'd have a decent cartoon. too bad you half-assed everything and thought our votes counted in our election at all.

[Break of War]

thought provoking

this was definitely one of the more interesting flash moves i've seen in a while. the message i got was a bit different than Lancekatre got from this - i saw this more of an analogy, in that we are to bombs, what balloons are to sharp objects (in this case, light bulbs).
the art was ok. the clouds are ALMOST great - i think you went a little overboard with the filters. the lighting also seemed a bit too contrasting. you should make the colors a bit lighter, and a bit more like the color of the cloud itself. shadows are never pure black - they get color from ambient occlusion. there's an art "tutorial" online that might help you out with that: http://www.itchstudios.com/psg/art_tu t.htm#light_stuff

regarding the art of the last scene, with the balloons...i really, really didn't like it. the balloons seemed too...for lack of a better term, "noobish." the gradients were amateur, and after spending so much effort to give off a sad atmosphere, that's all i could focus on, was the gradients. it really took away the atmosphere. soften up the color so it's more orange, to fit the general lighting scheme, and don't make them stand out so much.

the animation itself was ok. there wasn't a whole lot of it, but what was there served its purpose fine. the only thing i thought looked a bit off was when the bombs were first being dropped. it's hard to explain, i guess - it just looked "off."

other than that, the movie was pretty good. the message was interesting and the way you presented it was great - it gave people room to interpret it without being way too vague. great job!

Vitri responds:

Thank you for the review and for the tutorial link, i will need it very soon:)(New Project)

[Chuck's New Tux!]

that was genius!

i would have given you 9 stars, but that ending took me totally by surprise. just because you (or your friend, rather :P) managed to be unpredictable, you get an extra star.
the art in this was pretty much great, but not amazing. it was fairly basic, but it wasn't too minimalistic to the point where the lack of detail was annoying. it could have used a bit more, but i understand you were on a deadline, so it's all good. the animation was amazing, though! it was fluid and it looked spectacular. i loved Chuck's twitching at the end, and his barfing was pretty funny. his voice was only a little annoying, but it's not because of bad sound quality (it was perfect) or bad voice-acting (also pretty much perfect), but rather just because of his character, which was charming at the same time.

all in all, a perfect short. great work!

[OLD Tywo At Large Ep. #1]

nifty!

yeah, i agree with the previous reviewers; this is way underrated. the only thing that irked me about this flash (and i'm a pretty picky guy) is the lip sync, which wasn't done very well. that's really my only critique that i can offer this. your art was fantastic - cartoony, but very well-defined and realistic. i love how you did the lighting, too. it was excellent. small touches like Tywo's shadows when the cop cars come by really show how much you pay attention to detail.

excellent work. hopefully the next one won't be so underrated (:

Pixmintro responds:

Thanks, my next movie I'm making probably won't be completed until June, but it will be totally awesome! This movie x at least 10.

[: Squirrel Songs V :]

finally!

the day has arrived where flashes i made when i was 12 are scoring higher than this. i win.

don't feel ashamed, though. it's not like it's your fault you're a hack who ignores every bit of critique people give to you in hopes that you produce something decent and original, rather than the same thing for the past 5 years.

oh wait