Coop's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Africa Dudes]

Note to Stamper

Chips are called French Fries when they are from McDonalds in the UK :3

Right, this is a particularly funny, insughtful and cutting edge animation... Oh wait, no it isn't. It sucks balls and you should all feel ashamed of yourself for your racism and homophobia. The Kenyan lad that just brought me my cup of tea is incensed!

As with all collabs, there were some good, some back and some indifferent jokes, some that we could really relate to and a few that leave me questioning what form of editing went into the process.

Did you do the sky as an afterthought, give them all a blue screen to work around, or just make it with that in mind all the way through, telling them to animate it each as a focus for their piece.

Some of the gourd masks were incredibly well detailed and I particularly approve of Swain's work, though chluaid's part was bizarre and well conceived, even when dragged out for so long.

A nice fad for a week or two on the front page, no doubt. Willyou actually be carving your own mask like this out of gourd, pumpkin or marrow over the next few weeks - that would be great for the art portal and you'd certainly get some plaudits. Any artists seeing this, get your knives and paints at the ready!

It was interesting to see how people worked with the masks, as to how much changes they could get away with. RomeoJr was the only one that did any animation to the faces of the masks, though it would have been funny to have these guys turn away to put different masks on to change their emotional states.

[Review Request Club]

Stamper responds:

the hell is review request club

i wonder if it's anything like the Fuck Coop83 Club i just founded

[SRM's Qwanzaamas 2008!]

Ride of the Valkyries

Awesome to see that Qwanzaamas returns for another successful year, with the usual stuff, plus the addition of Ray Romano in an Apache, shooting the presents at the house.

I think that it could have been improved by the neighbours coming along and going all "Black Hawk Down" on Romano, by firing RPGs at his chopper, just for a laugh, as SRM tells one and all that they cannot open their Qwanzaamas presents until morning. The new character that I've not seen before (to my knowledge) that got toasted by Jebediah's heathen lazer was an interesting touch, with a little Futurama joke thrown in there, for effect.

I'm looking forward to seeing what 2008 can bring for you, as it looks like more improvements are being made.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

That extra character who only shows up in this cartoon to be destroyed is a friend of mine's furry self portrait. He sent me the .fla so I just put it in this cartoon and shot lasers at it. He thought it was funny so I left it in. I don't advocate pretending you're a cat or anything, but whatever floats your boat.

Having SRM and his buddies shoot down Romano could have been funny, and definitely not outside my talent at the time. But hey, if they shot him down then who would bring their presents the next year!?

I think I ended up skipping Qwanzaamas in 2009, but did an SRM Holiday toon of sorts at the end of the year. I actually didn't make one for 2010 either; oh well. 2008 is a crazy year for my cartoons, and has my very brief rise to Internet fame and it subsequently petering out.

[Jebby VS Ice Cream Truck]

Damned heathen wagons!

Wow, what a noble little crusade embarked upon by Jebediah, his two distinctly different only sons, Mini Chewbacca and Mini Pope. Which Mini Pope was this, as surely Nazi Pope could replace him, despite John Paul already having been dead for two years at the time of publication.

That aside, we have a very nicely animated piece that shows the true potential of your skills , as the iceberg breaks through the waves. There is still plenty more to see, beneath,k it's just that we haven't seen them as yet.

The destruction of the ice cream van was a slight problem, as the component parts didn't burst into flames, which would have topped it off nicely. Give it a little more attention to detail and you'll be making some stunning pieces.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

Mini Pope is just one of the dozen or so characters I came up who are basically Jebediah wearing a different hat. I even used the same movie clip of Jebediah, stretching and skewing it slightly for each character. I enjoy using the Jebs, they just don't have much potential for animation right now.

I pretty much used the same explosion technique I used for the bus in Night of the Living Spud. I used that same explosion movie clip for YEARS. Vehicles are notoriously hard to draw, and so is blowing them up. I haven't tried doing really good hand animated explosions yet, but I hope to in the near future.

[NOTLS 2: Spud Terror]

And an Evil Dead reference to boot! :3

Ah, how far this series has come. I could certainly see that the SRM added douche-baggery has increased the length of this series, though it appears to have drastically reduced the life-expectancy of the main protagonist for this piece.

Wuggie for a brain - who'd have thought it? Plus machine guns, just to make it even more dramatic and far-fetched.

Seriously, what other movies did you watch for this, as it looks like you got the idea for the machine gun arms slightly modified from Evil Dead when Ash's arm is replaced with the chainsaw, towards the end of Evil Dead 2. Not that I dislike that movie, or any of the series - they all have their places.

I'm looking forward to the third episode of this, as it's looking like being some fun, in spite of the main character recently being lobotomised. Was that a 40k chain sword that you animated?

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

This was actually a big reference to Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez's half of Grindhouse, even going so far as to use the movie's theme music. The main character has her leg chewed off by a zombie, and has it replaced by a machine gun. I highly recommend it! At the very end was an Evil Dead reference with the chainsaw arm, yeah. Also I reused my chainsword from SRM 40k because I was lazy.

The influences for this cartoon are the Evil Dead, Grindhouse, and a Bud Light Halloween commercial.

[SRM's Red Ring of Death]

A great laugh

Well, that's the best of your pieces that I've seen so far! No doubt, just excellent work, great script writing, you've sorted the sound and animation issues and now the light at the end of the tunnel has suddenly come up trumps with your work resembling some serious threats for awards.

Only 926 kB?! Shit, that's some serious compression there, even for 2007, considering that the size limit was at least 5 meg, possibly even 10 by then. No matter, you've still got plenty of time to use that cap space and make better pieces. Perhaps consider searching for better quality music to back up your pieces with? The Audio Portal has stuff that you might find useful and it's free, so you might find some artists that can give you good feedback and create songs just for you.

The rewind was a brilliant idea here and the fact that you just rewound the episode for about 30 seconds was genuis, so that you can get in more jokes with Jebediah, the shop keeper.

Yes, I would have advocated the PS3, over the X360, as it's clearly superior, but what would I know? The punchline was well delivered, as were your cursory call back jokes, this time to Night of the Living Spud. I'm not sure who Ray Romano is, but I hate him for what he's done to this flash. Come on, at least animate the mouth properly - it made him look like he was wearing a poor horseshoe moustache. If you want to see a good one, Search London Meet and check the pictures of me, near the end of the thread ;)

It's certainly looking like you were working towards a good 2008 from what I've just seen of the final few months of 2007. I'm looking forward to ploughing through those over the next few days :)

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

Ray Romano is an American television actor - the show Everybody Loves Raymond starred him and was on for like a decade. He's not especially good or bad, but my Cousin Mel voice is really similar to his. They joke about it a lot on The Venture Bros. where Henchman 21 has basically the same voice too. Romano's face animation was really half assed, and his jaw separated under his nose. It looked funny so I kept it. I've used him about 1 or 2 more times since.

If I did the rewind now I'd double the speed and make it a shorter trip backwards. I only had Windows Sound Recorder back then and it was sorta limited in functionality. This is the one cartoon where I had a decent mic but hadn't figured out how to crank the sound quality up yet - as a result, the filesize is tiny, as you remarked. Also, the Lord of the Rings music is terrible because I couldn't find what track on the soundtrack had that part of the theme on it.

I loved this cartoon when I made it, but it's a little too lolrandom for my tastes now. Then again, this is the only cartoon I ever completely ad-libbed without drawing out first - I came up with each scene as it happened. As a result I was really joke-oriented, but the whole thing is kind of disjointed. I wouldn't recommend that for a full on cartoon again, but it was a fun experiment.

My cartoons start getting good right about now. Glad you're finally past my more awkward growing pains-stages of Flash work!

[The Real World!]

Nice work

The animation looks better, as the characters seem to have been re-drawn and you've given a much more rounded presentation, though that cat thing did deserve to die. Wuggie should have been armed and taken that fucker out though :P

I can understand the frustrations and I only hope that you've got all of the issues resolved now. With the way that things looks to be getting better for the future, would you consider ever animating scripts that other people write for you, or are you strictly a one man writer / director? Obviously, I'm thinking towards the Literature Portal, which will have Flash scripts submitted there, for animators the pour over and find a decent one for them.

It's a good indictment of the situation of reality TV shows and the fact that the population is getting dumber by watching them incessantly. Perhaps you need to make a piece with Paris & Nicole in Hell, with some sort of cameo from SRM as the Devil, or something similar, so that you can show how funny that would be.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

I've since had problems syncing sound to animation, but I figured out a lot of solutions since. You'll realize a lot of the talking animation in this is just random flapping with no emphasis on timing or hitting the right beats in dialogue. It would have been better if I knew the tricks I knew now for fixing out of sync audio.

I don't think I'd do other peoples' scripts for cartoons like this (professionally is a completely other topic) although I have voice acted for other scripts before.

And yes, icanhasPayneburger deserved to die. I don't know what the hell I was thinking with that one - probably just too much Arfenhouse.

[clock day extravagornza]

Cutting Expose on Clock Day

Breaking news - someone got the joke and told everyone about it. The way that this animation is better than about 90% of the pieces that pass on any given Clock Day just sums it up really. I love the way that you've got a decent take on an "OMG, I forgot my Clock Day Piece" theme, as you get asked if you know that it's Clock Day.

With the way that things panned out here, we're looking at seeing some great works coming from you, as it shows better quality animation techniques, with the rocket launcher, so I'm highly encouraged by this. Keep up the good work and I look forward to seeing you win some awards for your flash in the future*.

*I knew you did win some, but there will be pieces that you're still to make that also win awards here, I'm sure :D

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

Well, about half of this was my buddy Rik, who doesn't really go here anymore. It's all beautiful garbage though. This cartoon was my first Clock Day, so Rik and I just whipped something up over the course of an hour or whatever.

[The Uncompleted]

Everyone has their "slush pile"

Your first Clock Day submission, unless I'm mistaken. I like the fact that you've gone to the trouble of getting 5 or 6 pieces of unfinished work and stitched them together. It really does show people that you've been working, but procrastination for one reason or another has set in, causing issues of one type or another.

This piece does have some good bits, though the ending did leave a lot to be desired, with the white screen of doom, with that piece of music from Pulp Fiction over the top. An audio credit here would have been really nice, as it's a great piece of music.

With the guitar, get SRM's hand moving up and down the neck, so he can play some notes - little things make all the difference. You could quite easily have expanded upon this piece to make the Kitty Shooting piece your Clock Day entry, by having them die in funny ways for a loop of extreme violence, as SRM takes on the KK and wins, by the looks of it.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

This was just a bunch of unfinished cartoons I'd been working on, and really the reasons I gave up on them were because they just weren't that good mostly. The SRM dystopian future one was going to have some sort of ninja SRM come in, but I scrapped it since I don't like pointless violence Flashes that much.

A few parts of this were actually made for it just because it wouldn't take long, like the Jebediahs on paper part. The only reason I released this at all was because I found that nothing gets blammed on Clock Day, so I figured why the hell not.

You get to see SRM play a guitar quite a few more times in cartoons as time goes on, sometimes better than others. This was just my first (admittedly iffy) experiment with it.

[NOTLS: Redux]

Slightly better than the first

I can see where the differences between the first attempt and the redux are, with some of the lines altered, a little tidying up of the animation in places (might just be me, but credit if it's due) and a major overhaul of the sound. You've done your fans a major favour here, setting the scene for a sequel or two, which I know are now available.

What I'd suggest is perhaps writing a few more deviations to the script in there, so that you could really tell it was a redux, as opposed to something that might be classed as a "touch up", in spite of the new audio.

Adding subtitles was a great touch and it looks set to progress with the series.

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

Glad you took my advice and watched this version too.

If I were to do a true redux of this (I pretty much just used the word to make it catchy) I'd rewrite it from scratch. A lot of the dialogue is kinda stilted to me, and the timing isn't so hot. This was one of my favorite toons when I made it so it was cool to get it back out there at a higher standard. I figured it was better to release it separately as a redux than just go in and edit the original movie's Flash file here on Newgrounds - that way more people would see the better version.

The major refinements I made with this were pretty much audio and the background art, with a little animation tweaking here and there, I think.

[Night of the Living Spud]

Funny, but sound was screwed

Didn't you warn me that this was the worst piece that you had for sounds? I can see why if that was the case.

The animation was decent and the standard was still improving with time. I think that while the sound may have let it down, it's still quite funny. I'm guessing that you get this issue sorted, as with another 50 odd animations to your name, we're looking at too much to sustain with such a critical issue. There is a great few jokes from Castro's grandfather / uncle that would have been made better by subtitles, as I couldn't understand him on the second or third tries, which was a shame.

The fact that you've made it a cliffhanger as well might indicate the possibility of a sequel, so give that a shot, why don't you?

[Review Request Club]

Battosai810 responds:

I ended up redoing this cartoon with some refined animation and better sound like a year later, under the name "NOTLS: Redux" - I would recommend watching that even though it's not in the order you're following for my cartoons, since the writing and animation aren't changed much.

I did say that this was my worst for sound, and I think it's somewhere between this and "The Real World!" for my worst sound issues. This is a better cartoon than that one though.

I ended up making a trilogy out of Night of the Living Spud, with the other two being NOTLS 2: Spud Terror, and NOTLS 3: The Evil Jeb. Hope you like those two more than this one!