Rammer's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[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.

[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)

[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.

[Russians again?]

hai thar

i liked the bubbles at the beginning. they looked awfully, neat, but then comes the motherland's flag. it looks sloppy - the lines aren't cleaned up very well and it needs some more animation; it's a bit jerky. the guy pushing the button looks pretty stylish, but i really don't like the green lines. there's no green in the environment, and he's wearing all black, so why is there green? i think a white outline would have done you justice on that scene. i noticed that the reflection wasn't a true reflection, but just a transparent version of the guy. i think, that if you had taken the time to draw a proper reflection (meaning, FINGERS), that it would have looked a lot nicer. the sound quality of the speech is good, though. no crackles or bumps or obnoxious breathing sounds to be heard. i like how smooth the missile-tracking lines move in the next scene, but the U.S. diverting them to Africa? i dunno, seems a bit devious. wouldn't we shoot them down?

then comes this next scene...the abrupt change in art style here really disrupts the atmosphere, here. it's far too cartoony and jagged. the semi-3d missile looks ok until it rotates downward, more. then it just looks like a load of multi-colored polygons. and then..it just ends. it seemed like far too short of a movie with this abrupt ending. i suppose one could make that into a positive, in that it didn't overstay its welcome, but i think it could have gone on a bit longer, going into detail of the ramifications the nuclear war caused.

pretty good movie, mr. Dew. a few flaws here and there, and it's a bit short, but other than that, it's pretty good.

Dew responds:

Haha, you're not a bad reviewer at all are you? You managed to get a lot of good points in your review, I like that. This submission happens to be an intro for another future submission. You made me laugh more than a few times, well worth asking you to review. Nice.

[Patrick's Dance]

OMFG

DONT MAIK FUN OF TEH IRISH CUZ UR A BIG OL MEANIE IF U DO ALSO GOD BLESS AMERICA

also it was silly and i fifened it up 7.97 times.

biblo responds:

wooppy wooo!

[I just Farted 2]

ugh.

do you really think that making a 10-second long cartoon and getting your clock friends to mass vote it is funny? does it give you a stiffy when a shitty spam flash by you passes through the newgrounds portal? i hate it when people like you take advantage of this system. people learn that shitty movies by people like you will always pass, so then they vote it up for the protection points.

RobertClock responds:

dude, i havent even pos ted this on the clockcrew website. this passed fair and square. no massvoting. go fuck yourself.

[Demon Dogs Trailer]

painful to watch.

way to take advantage of the nigh-pandemic love for anime, there. the dialog was terrible and corny and the animation was jerky and horrible.

get your own art style.

sayaka-mizaki responds:

hur hur hur
if it were so painful why watch? or even respond
you amaze me fool

stop drawing like a 2 year old and come back when you grow some balls =3

[L Ron Hubbard Quotes]

hmm,

maybe you're not aware, but this is not youtube. this is a place for flash, not videos.

this doesn't belong here, especially not with that horribly overused and out-of-place music.

Deathlock-5 responds:

file name ends in .swf, therefore this is flash.
horrible/overused/out of place is a matter of opinion
since this passed judgement i gues most of NG disagrees with you about this not belonging here