Newgrounds.com — Everything, By Everyone.

Whoops, that was me above. Not paying attention to which account I'm logged into :P

Just a few things that came to mind while watching it:

1) At points the character was hard to hear, which made him even harder to understand, especially at the end
2) The character realized that he turned into a boogeyman in the interview scene. It would've been better if we actually see him do this. Perhaps he tries to entice the boogeyman by dressing up like one and jumping out of the closet, thereby scaring the kid.
3) Some of the framing doesn't pull my eye to where it should go. During the interview scenes, why have him take up only 1/6 of the frame? He's more important than the abstract background, make him bigger/closer. Another time was when we're looking at the mousetrap, I didn't even notice the character was behind the bushes because he was right in front of the tree and camouflaged by it.
4) Also no replay button, c'mon you gotta have a replay button!

There are also probably issues with the writing, pacing, and some of the art, but these really stood out to me.

freesound.org has a decent library of sounds that are under a Creative Commons license.

Does any audio start on that frame? I've noticed that the first frame in the movie with audio, flash will sometime's freeze for a split second.

If this is the case, simply put a sound on just the first frame, and make it silent. This'll make the movie freeze before it starts.

Instead on animating a character on the main timeline, animate the character in its own Graphic symbol, then place this symbol on the main timeline and tween it at your will to appear to make a zoom, pan, etc 'camera' shot. If your main timeline consists of layers for background, character, foreground, you can easily tween these at different 'speeds' to simulate more realistic camera shots (parallax effects).

I never use the vCam and I use a gratuitous amount of camera movement.

Alternatively, you can try downloading a trial version of CS5.5 and export in there; newer versions of flash support exporting movie clips and action script to video.

What I do is place every animated portion in their own graphic symbols. This lets me mimic real camera movements easily. I can also add in parallax effects at my leisure, mimicking real-life camera movements rather than 2D camera movements.

At 11/2/11 02:22 AM, Xcyper33 wrote: Tried Windows movie maker...its good but exporting scenes from your animation doesn't work so good because it ignores action scripts. I'm seeing my 'camframe' movieclip when its not supposed to be showing.

Download a trial of the latest version of flash, CS5.5, and export all of your stuff to video if it'll let you. Later versions allow movie clip and actionscript recording to video. Just be sure to remove all preloaders, stop();'s and replay action script first.

Yeah, now I just keep the character in a close up or give him smaller movements most of the time. Much easier to deal with.

The bone tool is a jumbled, glitchy mess (at least in CS5). Don't use it for normal characters; use it for things that have clear ball-joint and arms.

Here's a test I did a while back. I now only use it for side shots of the character and anything that might have more than 2 arm-and-joints.

I did use the bone tool (foolishly) for the first part of this short flash on the robot character. It was a bad choice because the tool makes it difficult to extend or change parts in the animation.

Click on the frame with the audio, not the layer.

Export as several video files and assemble them in a video editor.

At 10/19/11 05:08 PM, EdgeFrenzy wrote: Good entries this week! Wonders should've scored higher, though.

I'm honestly surprised we climbed back up to Weekly 5th after being one of the movies hit by the mass down-vote. Too bad though, I wanted to see if we could've competed with the rest of the 4.5+ scores. Oh well, next time!

I start with an animatic since I do a lot of 'camera' movements. I find it's good to set up angles and get a sense of pacing before starting full animation.

At 10/16/11 09:18 AM, Xiphon wrote: Yeah, an hour before the day rolled over, someone may have bot spammed the portal. We watched the score drop on some stuff from 4.3 and 4.2 to below 3.2 in a matter of seconds getting hundreds of votes quicker than you could refresh the page.

Yup, we saw it drop a full point in probably a minute in the last hour of voting. Our number of votes probably doubled in that hour alone.

Try using Audacity or some other audio editing program to re-export it as a new mp3 file. Then try importing that one.

Submit the .swf with an allowed canvas size on the submit page. No need to resize the .fla at all, just make sure the aspect ratio stays the same. (looks to be about 831x700)

At 7/6/11 07:21 PM, Elfman-Rox wrote:
As opposed to the bone tool, you may want to use tweened symbols-within-symbols to make it look like armatures.

This can get very complicated and annoying to sync up if there are a lot of joints. Better off sticking to the bone tool.

Click between two pose keyframes on the bones' tween. Look in the properties window, there are easing options similar to classic tween basic options. It's a bit limiting but a lot easier to do Start and Stop easing as they directly give you that option.

Usually setting the export audio to ADCHP (or whatever it is) and make sure the audio is set to stream. This should fix audio desync.

How long is the animation and what's the framerate?

I use storyboards to figure out pacing of scenes and shots. I don't do full fbf animation, so I don't need to build off of the frame work as much.

On one level, it's good to be able to plan out how your scene will look, if you want to change 'camera' angles, of if you're putting in cuts or transitions.

At 6/8/11 10:30 PM, DjSavage wrote: Thanks for the replys everyone. I guess I didn't really understand the full job of animating when I picked out this hobby xD. I'm not really that good of a drawer. So, is everyone saying I should just practice drawing for now?

Drawing will definitely help, but it's not necessarily needed. I'm not that good at drawing and I've been animating for years. Started with stick figures (good for studying movement), moved onto simple characters (such as clocks), and also teamed up with people who do the character art while I do the animation.

Welcome to animating. Things to keep in mind: 1) this will take practice, 2) this will take time to do, and 3) this will probably take at least a spark of talent.

Start off by learning the tool (Adobe Flash), start small and learn the basics. YouTube and Newgrounds both have tutorials for Flash. A great place to start is www.freeflashtutorials.com (aka Cartoon Smart). I started out with this guy's tutorials years ago and they really push you in the right direction.

Use folders if it gets too confusing:

+ Elements
-- Grid/Guides
-- Sounds 1
-- Sounds 2
-- Music

+ Movie
-- Layers 1 through n
--
--

+ Background
-- Background/Back color

If you're essentially reviewing games and upcoming games' trailers, then that would likely fall under Fair Use of copyrighted material and would probably be okay.

You can split your audio in an audio editor, such as Audacity which is free. Alternatively, you can actually set the start and stop points of streaming audio in flash itself, in the audio editor, the slider/notches between the two speaker boxes.

For organization, just put animation chunks inside graphics/movie clips. This way you wont have that many layers on your main timeline, and can put as many as you need for each chunk. I generally do this with every 'camera-angle' cut.

The panoramic background looks good and the effect works. I think the character turns the corner way to fast and unrealistically. Try cleaning that part up.

At 5/23/11 04:17 PM, superjacku wrote: why is my animation playing slower than my audio on the time line? even when i export it it is the same in the .swf

Make sure the audio is set to Stream in the properties window/panel.

At 5/22/11 09:13 PM, AdventChild773 wrote: I tried making it a symbol, but shape tween won't work with symbols. Is there a way around this besides having to copy and paste each frame or something?

Motion tweens work with symbols (also Classic tweens). Shape tweens are for fills and lines only.

Storyboards and animatics.

I generally use rough animated storyboards to plan out my 'shots'. I'm mostly concerned about framing and pacing since I'm a tween-animator.

More detailed fbf animation will have animatics that seem to be framework for the final animation.

If you still have your .fla files, you can export as a video file instead of an .swf file. Then you can edit them in Vegas at your leisure.