Coop's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Pablo The Knight]

Dammit >:(

I thought there was going to be some other sort of gag, rather than that "I couldn't be arsed to animate" line. It was going so well and then the way that the cannon was presented was a great precursor to a suitably epic fight scene. What I didn't get was why you didn't animate the fight.

Still, there's some good work here and the animation is superbly rounded, though I was surprised not to see a single cow in this piece, nor even hear a cow noise from the battle sounds that you used.

A little more work and making the fight scene would really help you here. Good luck :)

[Review Request Club]

Imacow responds:

Lol, thanks coop. No cows in this one unfortunately. Some more may be coming along though. Thanks for the review

[Dirty Animal Dubstep Rave]

Simple concept, great results

I love the way that this piece worked out, with the various animals that you put together for this piece. It was a shame that you didn't do any colour splashes with the gopher or whatever it was that went across the screen towards the end of the piece.

Another nice addition might have been something like a polar bear, since the white background would have made for a challenging colour spray, perhaps a snowstorm of some description.

With the way that you've put this piece together, I'm expecting a lot of random shouts for various types of animals to be presented - would you consider a second version of this, if you could find an equally enthralling tune?

[Review Request Club]

[Ixintro 2010 Showreel]

An interesting mix

Some good pieces there - some I have seen before, so I haven't seen before and I can see that you'll be working on those a little in the coming months. Good luck with them.

I think you've got some talent for writing and animating, as the jokes that you've portrayed in here don't necessarily need voices to work, such as the woman walking off from the smelly guy, near the end of the piece - this clearly was a reference to body odour, with the way that he nearly incapacitated himself with his own fragrance.

With this in mind, just how many pieces have you amalgamated in there? I know that you've got a library of 12 submissions so far on Newgrounds, but with the additional pieces in there, would they all be from one piece, or from a small collection of animation projects?

[Review Request Club]

Pixmintro responds:

Thanks, all the pencil tests are individual lone pieces I did in classes and the clips from the unseen stuff are all from a cartoon I've yet to complete called "In The Morning". I also ended up not using anything from like 5 of the movies in my library.

[Cooking With]

Cookery program channel hopping

A real shame that you didn't have voices in this piece, as it might have really helped you along here. With the way that the three channels are introduced, you've got what appears like the cookery show on Gremlins 2, once the gremlins have taken over on Channel 1. This is quite funny, especially when he is confounded by the tin of tomato puree.

Channel 2 appears to be the cook who is preparing a romantic meal for her and a psychic / telekinetic powered mate. Lobster is fun, but it could have been a little less resigned to death.

Channel 3 appears to be a knife wielding maniac vegetarian. If you believe about Hitler being a vegetarian, you're pretty much onto the right thing here.

What irks me is the "cheats" used for Channel 3 and the chopping of the fruit - at least throw different arrangements of the same shape into the frame, ready to be chopped and pulped. This also confounds matters with Channel 2's final presentation, which has an apple, banana and pear alongside the lobster. The same shapes as we see on the rival channel.

Surely Channel 2 could say something along the lines of "now take your lobster out of the pot - look at how cute he is" etc and then dump him in the pot, for example. I can understand that channel 1 isn't going to have many lines of dialogue, if any. But 3 could as well as 2.

Give it a shot - you've done a good job with this piece, now go out there and do an even better one with the next one :)

[Review Request Club]

[The Love I'm Searching 4]

Wow, impressive

A very nice piece that has far reaching consequences and the style of the cartoons being drawn onto a partially traced, partially photographic background is incredible. I think that you've interpreted the music very well and have provided something very compelling to watch, while fascinating on the style and plot fronts.

I think that the style of giving the four main protagonists in the gang the same headphones, but represented by differing colours does lend a little bond of sisterhood to the girls and as a result, it allows a more empathic link with the viewer. This friendship that is shared seems to be a stronger one than the outward bond of the siblings, since they seem quite against one another, which is understandable, when you are in the same surroundings as a relative as close as them for too long.

Some of the references were a little strange and I had to watch this a few times to pick up on how the plot was being exposed as a whole, but aside from adding a subtitles bar, there wouldn't really be all that much that you could add to this piece by a way of improvement. I wonder if you would ever bring these characters back as a sequel?

[Review Request Club]

Skaijo responds:

Your review is highly appreciated. As it is, there won't be a sequel to this animation as this work was the the capstone to a series where the main focus was crazy fast pacing and random fighting/action scenarios. The goal was take a bit of a risk and try something on a sensitive note. I had a lot of fun working this out (thought the song certainly had it's repetitive moments of agony). The style of this and hopefully future animations is a combination of all Flash techniques used side by side, harmoniously. The next step is vector art and more subtle shading--which I hope you'll get to see during the next major project.

I've got an older sister myself. The bond I have with her is so strong that I easily take it for granted whenever possible. xD

[Doraleous and Associates]

Awesome!

The irony of the situation that I just stumbled across this series today on The Escapist. You've got some brilliant writing and a great comic timing across the group that really gives us ways to laugh at the misfortune or bad planning of the party as a whole.

Some good jokes, like the fearsome "Tightanus" (or is that Titanus?) and the fact that we haven't really learned too much about the party, except for the slight incompetence and petty infighting, we've learned that Drak is just a big softie, but that's so often true with the big guys.

I think that this is your best piece so far and Tom has certainly made the right choice in allowing you to submit pieces like this to the Portal. I look forward to seeing more episodes over time :)

[Review Request Club]

[Jossos Stickman]

Interesting test

I can see that there is improvement as the piece has gone one with the way tha the second stick man has a form to the face and looks more mannequin like, so brings a greater form forth to the piece.

I like the way that you had the interaction take place, allowing for the form of the piece to gather pace and the hat was a nice touch. Obviously the next thing is to add some flesh and blood to the piece all told, with additional layers of clothing and detail on the protagonists and some colour to really give the animation some award winning quality. Judging by your writing skill, I'd say that you don't need to work too hard on making some good plot to go with this.

Good luck!

[Review Request Club]

[CoolJaw: P.S. I-V]

Perhaps a Menu leading to sub menus?

Building up to another story, you seem to be spawning more contents pages than actual story here and it's starting to drag the piece down, in all honesty.

What you need is some sort of menu page that shows each one of your comic book serialisations on a page, allowing you to click and find the links to the chapters. It will make the start much easier for people like me, who have already seen the originals and much less tedious for those of us that haven't.

You've got some dark, macabre writing and looking at your piece overall, I think that it's nowhere near as good as Snowblind, so you need to work more on the game there.

Again, there needs to be some sort of logical progression of the speech bubbles, as I feel that moving from right to left on a page is somewhat odd, unless I was reading in Arabic, since that's how it works in languages in that region. Perhaps pay attention to these fine details and move on from there.

[Review Request Club]

Celx-Requin responds:

Hello,

I agree, sadly at this point when the series is almost done I'm way too much of a sloth to recreate another menu, that said you can use the scene select to jump past the other "act pages".

Thanks,
- Celx

[Shark Black: Demo]

Well designed and performed

I do think that this piece needs a little more in the way of better voice acting and perhaps some subtitles, since I didn't quite catch all of the lines, because of the voice you chose and the limited lip synching. The mouth doesn't change shape dependent upon the word that you're trying to get them to say, it just oscillates between open and closed.

When it comes to the background detail of this piece you've certainly gone overboard here and that does mean bonus points for you. It also sets the bar pretty high for you to recreate when you make more of these pieces.

I don't know if it was a bridge that the guy ran across, but the strobe effect of the piece in that sequence, before the police station and the other buildings that he ran past just seemed to make me a little nauseous. That could do with shortening and perhaps changing for something a little easier on the eyes.

Finally, when the sword is shown in the room, should it have a pointed edge so close to the hilt? I always thought that katana tended to have the blade move straight to the hilt and not deviate for artistic purposes that might blunt or weaken the blade. As the guy says in the following scene, "I note small details"

[Review Request Club]

Celx-Requin responds:

Hello,

The film actually does have subtitles (english, and spanish), you just need rollover the subtitles tab and turn them on.

Yeah the backgrounds in the next one are going to be even more detailed, which is why its taking so dame long to finish.

I agree with what you said about the bridge scene, however when running off the source .swf file it works pretty well, sadly its really choppy on newgrounds...

Thanks for the review,
Sincerely,
- Celx

[If James Taylor Were On Fire]

A little short

I think that you've done a decent job with the lip sync and now you have to make it more difficult to take it further - change the shape of the mouth for the various syllables that he sings and get all of that lined up.

With the way that the piece looks, it's not too bad, but since he is supposedly singing from down a well, perhaps you need to start out in a shaft of light, with him on a stool and slowly build up the flames around him, as opposed to the acoustics not working too well with the sound of a tv studio.

Seeing a longer song would have been a good idea, since that leaves very little actual time for interpretation of the plot, so you aren't left with very many options to work with, but the work was good and it needs a little more attention to detail, such as the drawing (zoom in more, use a slightly smaller tool, to get better control and you'll soon see that the drawing improves massively.)

[Review Request Club]

Rabid-Animals responds:

Thanks for the drawing tips. Your ideas about the intro are pretty good, too.