MistyE's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[FMTS Opening Credits V. 3]

First of all, I'm going to address the theme song. While it's pretty simple and short, I think it fits the type of series FMTS is very well. I personally think the two lines "a lot of stuff has happened" and "all this crap has happened" are a bit too similar to each other. I think I prefer this version over the one you uploaded to the Audio Portal.

The main issue I have with the animation in this is how the animation sort of moves with the beat. It looks a bit awkward here, though it would probably look worse if he just stood there. It looked sort of alright when he's rapping but when the microphone did it in the beginning it looked a bit uncanny.

The part where he's grabbing for the microphone is pretty good in itself, the only problem is how uneven the line quality appeared to be. At some points it seemed almost squiggly. This tends to happen when I do frame-by-frame, so a lot of times I'll either re-draw it or zoom in and then smooth it out so that it's a more accurate inbetween.

A smaller subject I want to point out is that I think the colors look a little dull in this particular scene. The background is gray and the microphone is a lighter shade of gray, but it still doesn't look very good. There's a variety of ways you can go about this. The most common that I've heard is to make the focus of the shot either noticeably lighter than the background or noticeably darker than the background so that it emphasizes the shot more. You could also blur the background out, but that won't work if there's nothing in the background like in this case. This might be helpful: http://www.colorcombos.com/combolibra ry.html?page=2&search_hex=gray

I'm not a fan of the re-used frames when he's rapping. It reminds me of The Flintstones where they constantly re-use the same motions. I would personally suggest that you vary the timing so that you won't have to re-draw everything, but it still looks fresh.

The animation on the quarters looks pretty good in the beginning, though by the end instead of falling over it looks more like they're shrinking.

The wink at the end was a nice touch.

Overall, it was pretty good but it could use some improvement.

artistunknown responds:

I would hope you would prefer this version over the original one since this one has actual emotion in the rapping and an actual custom background track. Those two lines are very similar, though I look at it as basically a summary, with one of the lines close to the beginning, and the other line close to the end. But yeah, the lyrics of the theme song were never meant to be spectacular.
Trust me it does look bad without it. I was questioning whether I should have made the mic jump in the beginning, originally it didn't, but I decided to do it because of FrogMan moving to the beat. I might get rid of the mic moving.
Hopefully line quality isn't a problem any more because now I have a tablet. I spent way too much time on that slow grab, I probably won't go back and try to fix the uglyness of the lines, but I'll consider it.
I've never really been the greatest at backgrounds. I might play with the colors a bit. I tried varying the color of the backgrounds where there wasn't anything, but I guess that didn't really work. I'll try to play around with the colors in the shot of the microphone.
Yeah, re-useing frames is lazy, though I'll probably just leave it how it is since with the current song it would probably be too much of a pain to try to fix, plus again laziness and I'm trying to get the rest of episode 6 finished. I'll probably retouch the opening credits though.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time on the beginning of the quarters, but got lazy and confused by the end. I might go back and fix it, cause the fall does look pretty bad.
I was thinking about having more animation on the title, but since it's a still image, it would be a little bit of a pain especially since I don't have the original flash file for the image.
Thank you for the review, I will try to rework it a bit, and hopefully I'll have the 6th episode out soon!

[Shapeworld: Brave Hexagon]

how this resulted from the Pixar (not Disney) movie Brave is beyond me, but it's still unique in its own way.

[CFAC vs Cow (July 2012)]

chicken & cow, mrcontesty's newest lovable characters make their legendary debut in july 2012. this is only the start of one of the best series of all-time.

[Air Ferry - LoopDeLoop]

minimal animation, but stylized and good choice in sound effects.

[Double Point Day pt 2]

i must say that even though this flash doesn't excel visually, it dos have its own charm and it does a good job of establishing what it's supposed to.

the dialogue here is crucial and isn't just "all over the place" like some other artists tend to do when they get carried away.

this is a good example of how to use minimal animation skills to your advantage, so good job nat.