Coop's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[[CD10] Colin on Clock Day]

Colin Mochrie FTW!

Well, that's a nice change - an upbeat piece of music, accompanied by a legend of the animutation scene through the years. Colin Mochrie really is a prince among men.

So, the animation was pretty psychedelic, a little repetitive and the musical loop got a little annoying after about 20 repetitions, but that's a minor thing that you could fix by making the file slightly larger. We've got a 10 meg limit and for Clock Day, no expense should be spared. Always think "what would StrawberryClock do?" and then do it even more, particularly with submissions on the 15th of August ;)

Thanks for the advice about swallowing knives - I'm trying to cut down.

Punisher responds:

I was just teasing you about the knives. Don't actually do that.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[[CD10] How About I..]

Well, it's the tune, but no real video.

Hmm, I should give you some kudos for throwing some sort of animated .gif there in the shape of the parrot. How about you slap my shit? You kinky fucker.

It could have been so more, but when we consider that you've only thrown a good quality sample loop from the very catchy tune of Yolanda Be Cool, you're almost onto a winner. I almost wish that you'd animated the parrot to act in a video similar to the actual music video for this track.

Still, I'd love to see what you're capable of outside of Clock Day, so give it a shot :)

[Review Request Club]

Punisher responds:

I do not actually want to slap feces, it is merely a figure of speech.

It is more commonly seen on the internets with an angry gnome picture type meme thing.. this is just moreso in fun. Like a parrot with sass.

[Danger Global Warming]

Good, but I'm unsure

I think that you've made a good looking piece here, but there are a few bits that need to be looked into, in order to benefit from the impression that you're trying to make:

1) This is directly ported in from YouTube. While this may not bring into question the validity of who wrote it (I'm positive it's yours) I think that you need to find a way to get the video itself uploaded here, as opposed to hosted on YouTube and embedded. I'd rather see you and Newgrounds get the ad revenue for the clicks on this page

2) Screen size - you've got the small screen in the middle of this piece and have filled up the border with useless wastage. You could make the video so much bigger, by utilising the resources available to you. If the file size limit is an issue, PM TomFulp and get it increased to around 20 meg.

3) Background - the black border, surrounding the largely black presentation doesn't go together well - lightening it up would help, so that you can convey the dirt, pollution and desperation better within the video itself.

I'm not sure that I agree with the messages in the video, but these might not even be your own, so I won't dwell on that, to be honest.

[Review Request Club]

BruceKnox responds:

WELL GEE... AS SOON AS I CAN GET A 5oo MG VIDEO TO PLAY IN A SWF FILE SMALL ENOUGH TO FIT ON THIS SITE - YOU WILL BE THE FIRST TO KNOW - ALONG WITH JESUS, SATAN AND THAT KID FROM ASIA WHO SMOKES 40 CIGARETTES A DAY.

AGAIN ANOTHER AWESOME COMMENT JUST PROVING THAT NEWGORUNDS IS ONLY INTERESTING TO SHOWING SMALL FILES MADE BY KIDS SHOWING OFF SHIT, INSTEAD OF GIVING PEOPLE LIKE ME THE OPTION TO DISPLAY ACTUAL WORK.

SO DEAR NEWGROUNDS, WHY CANT I UPLOAD SOMETHING OTHER THAN SWF FILES HERE??? WHY ARE YOU RETARDING ME AND OTHERS (IF THERE ARE ANY OTHER PROFESSIONALS ON THIS KIDS SITE???) WHY NEWGROUNDS, WHY???

BRUCE

[Milk & OJ Bestest Friends]

The rumblings of 2009

Ah, so we begin your collection of 2009 flash presentations by a milk and OJ toon. I half expected to see OJ Simpson making an appearance here, but was left to a glass of some sort of fruity beverage instead.

I love the way that you've got things together for this piece, complete with one of your lesser known characters vomiting his guts up outside McBurgers. Now all we need is to throw in something to do with SRM and perhaps Spudboy and we're away for the start of something different. How about the two of these characters dancing away in SRM's fridge - he's bound to want something out of there, like car keys or something a little retarded.

I can see that by starting the year with an award winning piece, you're ready to take the next step in making more impressive flash movies and who knows, even games?

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

I like the phrase "something a little retarded", not sure why, but I do. SRM is in the background of the restaurant; I'm pretty sure I just reused the background from the McBurgerbell cartoon. Also, if you pause the cartoon and zoom in really, really close on the vomit you'll see a cameo from another one of my characters!

To date the only game I've made is Hitler's Strawberries. Rik and I keep throwing around ideas for Hitler's Strawberries 2, but our schedules conflict and it generally just doesn't happen. I also had plans for a Contra-like SRM game based on my CoD4 toon (previously called SRM the FPS) but that didn't pan out, obviously.

[SRM Transformers 4 Part 1]

Rickroll'd

Wow, what an exciting episode of plot holes, merchandise pushing and over the top sound effects, compared to the music. A shame that your animation is too advanced for G1 Transformers, but I still keep coming back for more - this stuff is awesome and it really gives me something to enjoy, while in the mood for some proper nostalgia.

The way that you bring in new characters all the time and they keep coming out with new moves that I'd almost forgotten about, much like Jazz getting torn in two by Melatron (I noticed that you spelled his name "Megatron" in one of the bios :P) is brilliant. Keep that old skool humour coming!

With how you've added blurbs and bios about the characters, you've made one crucial error - the buttons for next and previous are the wrong way around for convention. If you think of it like turning the pages of a book, you'll have previous to the left and next to the right. I moved straight to the menu key,l which confused me, to be honest.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

Huh. I never noticed that the menu buttons were the wrong way around before. I don't think I did that in my other cartoons with menus. Welp. I did notice the Melatron/Megatron misspelling, but whatever.

I was really happy to work in a few references to Michael Bay's Transformers with this cartoon, just to keep things current. Conecrusher's design and Jazz's death are both awkwardly translated from the movie for whatever effect.

SRM Transformers 4 Part 2 didn't get made until like 6 months after this one, just because I was so worn out by this cartoon. It was a huge undertaking and the two parts were originally written as one 15 minute epic. It turns out a lot of that is because I wrote way too much dialogue, but it worked as an ending to the SRM Transformers cartoons. Once you see SRM Transformers Part 2 you'll realize I'd pretty much hit the peak of the series and wouldn't go further. I did start a 5th cartoon, but I scrapped it due to low quality, comparatively.

[Fallout 3 Mel's Addiction]

Great work

A legendary idea of how someone gets that badly addicted to a game, that they play it to destruction and beyond. I think my brother was worse than that at one point - he used to come to the table for one meal a day and that was only because Mum forced him to get off World of Warcraft for a short while.

I almost expected SRM to walk out of the Gamestore with the till still under his arm, but no, you took it one step more sublime - the shotgun to the computer. Yet another mighty step towards further progress with your work. Careful though, as I noticed that Mel's jaw seems to have an imperfection in it , near where you have it hinged. Iron that out from the animation standpoint and you're looking very good.

Another solid performance that earns you another award. You're getting quite a collection of them :)

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

I just got New Vegas a few weeks ago and I'm feeling it kick in again already!

I base most of my cartoons on something I've either experienced or seen, and this is no exception. Write what you know, right? The shotgun to the computer was just taking a joke one step further into more cartoonish territory, which I'm glad I did.

As for Mel's jaw, I don't think I ever noticed. It used to happen sometimes when I hyperextended their jaws back in the symbol-using days like this. If you look back at SRM and Wuggeh, I actually painted over every frame that this happened in, which back then was like all of them. Since it was all gradients it was really, really noticeable.

Glad you liked this toon! Unfortunately it was one of the last cartoons I made to get real attention here at Newgrounds.

[Tactical Directive Pt1 v1]

Unfinished work

Alright, let's see what we've got here - I've just sat through fifteen minutes of this and it is certainly a well written piece, that draws attention to various issues and I can see that your research may have been conducted across a wide range of films of this nature.

As for what needs to be done, you have a longer list than I'd expect from a piece that is this well written. Start by having the grammar checked. The opening line, for example should be "people that dress up for their own funeral." You don't take your clothes with you and get changed when you're at the church, after all.

On the preloader, you've got the start screen, but no button to get you to the menu. That needs to be fixed, as it's unnecessary to get viewers to right click and press play.

The piece takes a while to get going, as it's very quiet and setting the scene, while it may take a while, could be edited down for time. You're not bad at tracing, but the drawing aspect needs to be worked on, as it lets the writing down.

The voices are very hit and miss, as it seems that from your three voice actors, at least one of them doesn't have a professional microphone, so we end up with poor quality volume settings and the occasional static crackle over the recording, which is a rookie mistake, to be frank. I understand that these actors might be your friends, but there are plenty of Voice Actors out there, just have a search on the Audio Forum. I might even be able to supply some, if you were interested.

On the final phone call made to the guy in the office, you can see a glimmer of the scene beneath the subtitles bar - sorting that out is not a major issue that you need to sort, but it is something that just needs to be tidied up to give a more professional finish.

I know that it seems like a pretty damning verdict and a piece that has won a daily second place award shouldn't be scoring so lowly on a review, but a small catalogue of niggling difficulties can make a huge impact on the enjoyment of the piece overall. I will watch the second one and if this goes even further than just these two parts, when you've improved your animating skills, you might want to come back and remake the animations to cope with your new skill levels.

Best of luck.

[Review Request Club]

MOC-Productions responds:

Thank you for all your constructive criticism. It is well appreciated. I'm aware of many of the things you pointed out and agree with most of them. The only thing I'll point out though, is that there is a menu button on the load screen. It's up at the top. Believe me, I wouldn't neglect something like that lol. Thanks again for your helpful review.

[Ghosts 'n Goblins V.2]

Not bad

At first, I thought it was a game, but when I wasn't able to do anything, I gathered that it was a movie, but that's about the only thing that gave it away for me. Try adding some sort of script for this piece, as otherwise it's just a gameplay demo, which wasn't all that good, to be honest.

I'm extrapolating and seeing the script underneath this a little, though I'm not exactly that well versed on what the hero is doing or why he's fighting against a mouse pointer, in some sort of "Animator Vs. Animation" piece.

Perhaps in the third instalment, he's going to break out of the game and make it to the user's desktop, where the fight becomes a lot more real. Making a story for us to follow and adding subtitles to bring it all together would make this piece a lot better.

We've got a great piece here that just needs a little more work to polish it and we're talking something that could legitimately push for awards.

[Review Request Club]

Pienkaito responds:

But it's labeled as movie. Oh well. You ain't the only one.

This has more potential, but due to deadline issues, it didn't come out as good as I hoped.
The main point about the V.2 series is about a creature, which has the ability to change the past videogame-generation.
Also, the hero (Sir Arthur in this) sees Curse-R as a threat/enemy.
The series maybe inspired by "Animator Vs. Animation" but this is different. Not totally, but different.

Thanks for the well-written review.

[SRM Call of Duty 4]

Awesome! Another award!

A very good and witty expose on the intricacies of gamers and particularly the lesser known problem of gamer kids. Now that they are coming into their own after the first generation of gamers had kids and brought them up, the problem seems worse than ever.

Perhaps you should do something about a dad that plays one of these games against his child, absolutely owns him on the game, then the kid resolves to practice for ages, then finally gets one over on his dad, who proceeds to hang himself, or something equally retarded like that.

The ideas of people gathering around the girl sniper from team Mel was inspired, since that's what I've seen first hand on certain online games that I used to play. Now I stick to much more mature games, that I get on better with, thus reducing the chances of seeing friends of mine asked if they want to cyber.

The connection problems was a great aside, as I've seen that as well - a shame that you didn't have the game transpose them onto another map and restart the whole thing, because it went on the fritz. I've seen that happen a few too many times over at my girlfriend's, causing her brother to absolutely lose it with the Xbox.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

The whole bit about the kid practicing for ages sounds like the inverse of an old Simpsons episode from the first season or so, where Homer keeps practicing this boxing game so he can eventually beat Bart. Right before he wins, the system gets unplugged and Bart retires undefeated. I wanted to keep it to just a mom for this though; nothing really deep here, and no commentary on our poor single SRMoms.

The connection joke came around completely by accident. I had these little movieclips of SRM walking, accidentally left them in place and it ended up looking really funny. I've also been blessed with crappy connections my entire life, so it was good to have a joke from experience. Same with the Mel as a girl gamer. That's basically the only mention of a girl I've ever had in one of my cartoons aside from that shitty Prototype cartoon I made like a year after this.

Glad you enjoyed this cartoon - it's one of my most enduring and popular cartoons, and still gets a good number of hits on Youtube and Newgrounds. It used to be called "SRM the FPS" but it got no views whatsoever. Changing the title and resubmitting it changed that overnight.

[SRM short: McBurgerBell]

So much symbolism in such a short piece...

Well, that was an interesting piece, that really got the the heart of the matter about fast food outlets that seem hell bent on extracting every single penny that we earn, just to pad their profits.

I love the fact that SRM bought the wacky meal for the toy and then he proceeded to eat it. I never knew that was why some people bought the meals, as they never seem to do anything with the toys - we used to keep them until the batteries ran out, or they got broken and then they got discarded to some toy box that was cleared out once a decade.

Still, the animation seems smoother than ever and the voices are now very clear. One thing I would complain about is that the subtitles are a little on the small side, unless you expand the screen - was that the intention all along?

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

I thought up this cartoon on my car ride to move into my dorm for my first semester of college, and as such it's really my first complete animation from that point.

I don't really know why I decided to have SRM eat the toy; I probably just figured it was funny. I've still got all my old cheap fast food toys lying around somewhere in my parents' house. Those things are resilient for how crappy they are.

The subs were really tiny just because I thought it was nice to have them sort of out of the way. I would never do that ugly gradient subtitle box again though, ugh. The voices are so clear because at this point I'd gotten both a good mic and learned some decent Flash techniques for sound, so it ended up sounding really nice. Glad you liked the toon!