That was good.
I enjoyed it. All of the animations were beautifully put together. The one thing I didn't like was when the boy's dream became a nightmare. Kinda depressed me...and Santa looked black... >__>
Reviews for "One Quiet Winter Night"
Esn responds:
Er... maybe his hand is black from the soot in the chimney? :) Or probably there's just a lot of shadow falling on it.
Lovely.
I'm glad you took in the consideration of taking lessons in learning completely intricate FLASH illusions (couldn't word that properly), but it saddens me that the reviews under me have NOT gotten the gist of your short.
It's cute, the little boy has a wondrous dream of riding on a magic sleigh but all goes hectic when he doubts that Santa exists; only a personal visitation from Santa Claus assures him that he exists.
c:
Also, your pastel skills are amazing.
Esn responds:
Well, you got the story. :)
You perhaps missed a somewhat subtle element; the person who visited him at the end is not necessarily Santa, but is definitely someone dressed in Santa's costume. Perhaps it is Santa, or perhaps his father. There is no fantasy in real life, unless the imagination makes it; sometimes a glimpse is just as powerful.
P.S. It's not actually pastel; it was made in ArtRage with the standard paintbrush tool, but with certain settings that make it look like pastel. There's a topic on the ArtRage forums where I describe it.
P.P.S. I took no lessons as such, just read some tutorials and the help files that came with Flash.
holy crap
maybe its just my puter but it took longer to load than the actual movie.
and i really didnt see what was so great about it. i like the occasional serious film on newgrounds but to me it was a bunch of still screen shots of paintings and a little animation inbetween. the snow looked nice though..too short.
pretty much what im trying to say is i was a little dissapointed what with all the hype in the reviews below me. i voted a 3 and gaave you a 7 because the art was good. but the animation was very little..a sleigh and some reindeer..a kid blinks and santa takes a cookie.
Esn responds:
It was a conscious sacrifice on my part to forgo an easy-to-animate art direction in favour of a more complex one that I felt suited the tone better, but that reduced the animation possibilities. I actually removed some frames of animation when the boy looks behind him, because it didn't work with the art style.
My wish is for people not to look at it in purely "is it good animation" terms, but in "is it a good film" terms; animation is only one element, after all.
As for the file size, it did end up rather big, didn't it? If I had been using the newest version of Flash rather than FlashMX, I might've been able to make use of some of the new features and cut down the filesize by 1mb or more. But I'm comfortable with Flash MX for now...
The Dingy Touching Granddaddy's of Yesteryear!
So this was really something. It had the colors, the Santa, and most importantly it was family friendly. As long as it's good with the kids it's good with me. I am glad this is good for the kids because most vidyas around these parts just aren't appropriate for the young eyes that view them . I believe they should delete all the none family friendly vidyas on this site, because the kids are most important. Am I right or what?
Esn responds:
I don't think you're right (all videos on Newgrounds have a rating, so you can easily tell what's family friendly and what's not), but I do agree that the balance here is heavily skewed toward non-family-friendly material. There's still a lot of good family-friendly material on Newgrounds, though. I'd recommend starting with the films of Dustball.
The Best I Have Seen!
Thats plainly amazing worth 20/10 stars.... 1) You put an absolutely amazing effort in.
2) The Effort has shown a brilliant result.
3)1 Year work!?!?!?! Wow ... You musta worked dam hard.
Good Job!!!! Hope you make more!
Esn responds:
As I said, it's really more like 1.5-2 months. Just spread out over a year.
Thanks for the kind words.