What is most important to you?

[LovettGames]

When making an animation what do you guys consider important in your flash? Just curious really, thought we could smack a few ideas around.

For example, if you were creating a cartoon, what do you think is the most important aspect of it? Animation quality? Writing/ dialogue? Comedy, fluidity, trendiness, relevancy, or popularity? A complete combo? I don't know! I'm just curious to what you guys really want to get out of your art.

I've never made a finished animation in Flash (other than complete crap), and was just curious to know what you guys thought was important. If I made a flash I feel like the writing and direction would take precedence over the other factors. What about you?

[KhanhCPham]

Sound design. Sound can either make or destroy the animation. A show with bad animation but great sound direction can really turn the show into gold while great animation and bad sound can destroy the whole show. I find sound can set the pace of a scene whether its foley sound effect, voice action, and music.

[kmau]

Everything's important really, but I am especially nitpicky with colors. Sometimes I spend hours adjusting colors.

[tohoscope]

At 8/29/12 04:42 PM, KhanhCPham wrote: Sound design. Sound can either make or destroy the animation.

But really good fbf animation stands on its own without any sound.

[Informant]

At 8/29/12 08:01 PM, tohoscope wrote:

At 8/29/12 04:42 PM, KhanhCPham wrote: Sound design. Sound can either make or destroy the animation.

But really good fbf animation stands on its own without any sound.

I sort of believed this. After my first animation I thought I should have done more sound and stuff.
I really think I could have improved it with better sound. Also for some reason I was lacking in explanation of storytelling..
Maybe I was staring at my own work for so long, I lost sight of things I should have done.

[Terkoiz1]

I think submersion of an animation is most important so technicality and fluidity of an animation bothers me a lot. When I spot something that I intuitively know wasn't suppose to be there like a sketch accidentally left in or some blatantly absurd thing to suddenly eject me out of the animation bothers me or even a transition from a really high quality animation to a poor entry. It'd even got to a point where the anti-aliasing of a simple text bothered me.

if you submerse me in your animation, you get happy stars in my book :)!

[LovettGames]

Good point. I can definitely see how sound could be important. There's something about sound that really gets to a person's senses more than visuals, so I can see like a 16 bit game being boring until you turned up the volume.

[kmau]

Sound is indeed very important because it not only supports, but carries the visuals. If something in a movie has a fitting sound effect the movie is more immersive. On the contrary if something creates an unfitting sound or no sound at all, the audience may be catapulted out of immersion.

I find myself thinking "Wow that was a bad sound effect for that" often when watching flash cartoons.

[Jurgen]

It very much depends on the kind of movie you're looking to make.

If it's a comedy > Writing and dialog. Stuff like that.
If it's an action > Animation quality, art and pacing
If it's a drama > Writing and art

Overall I personally like seeing great writing quality and great animation/art. Those are the most important aspects IMO.