Wow
i feel this is just like my life..... almost exactly. this vid realy touched my heart...(sniffle) keep up all the wonderfull and amazimg work you do
Reviews for "The Love I'm Searching 4"
Oh, um
Um um, you're awesome!
Skaijo responds:
Woot woot, love is muchly appreciated. xD
Review
-I honestly wish the file size of this could be made smaller without screwing with the quality but alas I really doubt that is possible even if you load this externally. Some people with slower computers will get annoyed with the load time and just bypass it(took somewhere around 45 seconds for me but I had several windows open and it would of probably went a little faster if it was just this one page open). It will make it much less likely to be widely viewed by people and they won't get to see how great of an animator that you really are.
-The preloader is pretty snazzy in my opinion. It's not a generic Newgrounds loader or some plain looking one that you made. You actually dedicated some time to make it look nice. The words have that nice spray-painted on look pasted on the brick background. I'm not sure what the caution tape is for but still it looks cool. Actually it probably is a mental barrier holding them back or something along those lines. Quality controls are a nice addition too and help out some with people with slow computers. The little movie editing buttons on the bottom were quite useful since it allowed me to get to certain areas of the video that I thought needed to be watched again(i'll get to this later).
-The drawing style was quite interesting to me as i haven't seen too many animations drawn in this way. You may have used pictures and still frames for backgrounds but they were well picked backgrounds. You also had a wide variety of scenery and dimensions in the pictures you chose to use. Even though I don't think i've seen your previous animations I think it's safe to say you did a great job with the backgrounds. But with that you brought such a drasticly different drawing style into the mix with the characters and the many prop type items that the characters were using and/or around them. The characters were a bit messy but that's how most teenager/young adults are these days. They don't take a ton of time getting ready and have that just rolled out of bed look. Your drawing style really brought that out in my eyes and made everything seem more realistic and drew me more into the actual characters.
-The story is hard to keep up with honestly. It setting changes quite often and it's difficult to keep up with the characters and what they are doing. They look very similar to each other and I was confused as to who was who a couple times so I had to re-watch certain parts over a couple of times. It's a minor setback in plot fluidity but it's not a big issue as far as the concept goes.
-Probably the most perfect song you could of picked for this. It fit so well and helped smooth everything together a lot better. Without the music it would of been dragged down by two much voice acting and would of been a lot choppier. But the fact that there was still just a little voice acting involved in some areas made it more believable. Everyone was so animated throughout and really showed passion in some way, shape, or form towards what they were trying to achieve.
-As mentioned there are some minor flaws but what are meger flaws compared to the giant of what is this animation. It goes above and beyond to convey feelings without words. Something that is very difficult to do and requires a lot of facial and body expressions that are very tiny details but take a lot of time to do. All in all it's a giant leap above most people. Just try and vary characters a little more in the future so it's easier to tell them apart. Other than that it seems like you accomplished your goals with this amazing animation.
-Review Request Club
Skaijo responds:
Thanks so much for the kind and really indepth review. I really appreciate your time and the effort that went into this review. File size is certainly an issue I want to improve on. I feel like if I converted this to a video before uploading, I could have gotten it down to about 14MB but, on the other hand, I kinda have a esteem -boost by managing the feat of producing this animation entirely in .swf form.
In my next major project, I'll use the preloader to help explain the story better so that it's less confusing. I think that'll be a good opportunity to, in an entertaining manner, lead the viewers into the narrative without having to wait to read the author's comments. :3
-I'm considering a lyric's option at the end of my animations with English lyrics instead of subtitles while the animation is playing. What would you think of that?
Again, thanks so much for this thought-filled review! I sincerely appreciate the love. :3
Amazing!
After watching this I was left speechless. I actually watched it four times just to absorb the story (that and because it's a really epic flash :3). I mean, there's just so much to see in this animation. It skips crazily from scene to scene, full with detail and some hidden references. This is definitely the best music video I've seen on Newgrounds so far, good job! :D
The animation is just superb. It's not very smooth at times, but heck, you've worked a year and a half on this. I'll have to cut you some slack. Besides, a lot of the animation was very detailed and it shows that you put a lot of hard work in it. Still, some things could've been better, such as when they were running inside the school at the beginning. The leg animations were all the same :P. I should stop nitpicking xD.
The art style was superb. Sure, there were a few cliché things such as the mouths occasionally growing twice as big as they're supposed to be, but heck, that comes with every Animé so I won't complain. What I can complain about, though, would be the fact that the characters looked so similar. I mean, does everyone have to have white hair? Lol, I think if you vary the hair colour, the different characters will be more distinguishable, since right now some of the characters look similar to each other. That, and I don't think that everyone having white hair is a huge coincedence xP. Yeah, I understand it could be an art style, but having the same hair colour makes it harder to understand who's who...
However, what was quite impressive was how you blended real life pictures with animations. Usually, they look really out of place with each other, but I quickly forgot that the backgrounds were actually real-life images, and not drawn backgrounds because they were blended in so well. Good job with that =D.
The concept, unfortunately, is generic, but that hardly matters much. What I don't really like about the story was that it was pretty hard to grasp. It might be because of the fact that the characters look similar to each other, or because of the fact that the approach to the story is very subtle (how were we to know that the protagonist waving her hands constantly meant that she wanted to be a conductor, or how do we know that she failed in achieving this goal?), but somehow this Flash *almost* felt random. I mean, if I didn't read the story in the Author's comments, I would have not got head or tail of what was going on. There were a few things that I still don't understand, such as why the protagonist was angry when she saw her friend play the violin...
Having said that, the fact that the story was hard to follow didn't ruin the Flash at all. The first time I watched this, I had no clue what was happening, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. There were some funny parts, some emotional parts, and some interesting parts throughout the submission which really kept the viewer captivated and interested in what would happen next. The fact that the scenes switch so quickly also make this really fun to watch, especially more than once, because the more you watch it, the more you manage to build up a story and see how one scene is related to another.
The audio was extremely good. There was some voice acting which was great, and the song was very high quality, which is a rare find in Flash submissions here on NG. Not only was it high quality, but it was damn catchy too xD. So yeah, superb audio. Subtitles would obviously help here, but then again they might distract the viewer from the Flash itself (since it's so action-packed and all...) and cause him/her to miss a scene or two, so if you do add subtitles, then if I were you I'd definitely make them optional or something.
To summarize, I pointed out a few flaws here and there in this submission, but they definitely aren't enough to reduce a point from my review. This deserves the 10 I gave it for sure, and it surely deserves more than just 40k views and one award. I hope you keep up the amazing work, and great job once again on this submission!
10/10
5/5
-Review Request Club-
Skaijo responds:
Thanks again for this supportive, thought-filled review. This is probably the longest I've ever seen to be honest but it touches a lot of points I'll certainly use to improve on. Sorry you had to watch it so many times to understand what was going on. I'll make sure my next major project is less abstract. I was just in a a certain mood when I though this project up. :3
I learned a lot during this animation--but most importantly DUPLICATE SYMBOLS!!! So that's why a lot of stuff looks the same, copy and pasted over again. Lazy yes, but it sure cut down on the production time.
All the characters also have white hair as this animation is actually the trequel of my past two works Don't trip and This is UNMEI. The characters with white hair represented a separate cast that live in an environment that's effected by the real world. In the last two animations, that distinction was made pretty clear--but I really wanted to do something different this time and just take my time expanding this parallel universe a bit peacefully without any eminent doom or fighting scenes. None of those animations were seen by many people, but that shouldn't and can't stop a well-deserving project from getting published on my part. Meh, it's complicated but this series is more or less complete. :3
I really appreciate the review!
WOW! O_O
I'm not sure where to begin, this is a phenomenal animation. I'm absolutely entranced by it all. At first I was a tad confused, but I watched again and I got the idea of it all much better. The year and a half definitely paid off for you I do believe. Let's get cracking.
Animation, well, I'll throw animation and art into the same paragraph this time. They're both absolutely astounding, spectacular, marvelous, wonderful, any other word I might be able to throw out there. I love the art style to this animation, it's something I really haven't seen often at all. It's somewhat simplistic, yet at the same time it's truly captivating and seems like the work of an artist or experienced animator. I'm not moved by the animation and art though. I'm absolutely blown away by the animation and art! 10/10
The sound was wonderful high quality and almost as clear as day. The only minor drawback I could find here was that there were times I didn't quite hear lyrics clearly or something in that category (I blame compression). If you do something like this again, I would recommend adding subtitles as a countermeasure to that issue. Other than that, the sound is marvelous and the song is catchy as hell. 9/10
I won't provide feedback on humor for this one, you know where the humor is when you see it in this one. 7/10 on humor for being in small quantities, but the moments being good classic humor and enough to make me go "Haha" when I see them. :)
Overall this is the best animation that I've seen by a mile since my return to NG and easily one of the best I've seen of all my time on NG put together (dates back to well over 3 or 4 years). Absolutely astounding and impressively well done. This piece of work really deserves more than 39k views, honestly. This animation excels in character presentation, animation, quality, and almost everything else I can think of that's truly important to making an animation as close to perfection as it'll get. An almost perfect animation is deserving of an almost perfect score. 9/10
KAMAYKAZAY!
[Review Request Club]
Skaijo responds:
Holy crap, where to begin. Thanks for the long indepth review. The RRC, NG, and Flash creations certainly wouldn't be the same without thought-filled responses. So thanks. For the next major work I'm working on, I'll be sure to make efforts to make the story less confusing so multiple views won't be as necessary. I'd also like to include more stuff into my art style, including vectors and stamps, just so the entire look will be cohesively stylistic rather than it having distinctly drawn and photoshoped counterparts.
I'd love to hear how you think subtitles could be implemented via PM. Currently I find that a good deal of effort into the animation is lost when I have text right above it that I know people will be reading. What do you think of a lyrics option at the end of the animation that way, for people who absolutely need it--can see all the words in the song? Think that's a good compromise?
Humor was at best splice of life in this work--and +25k views is plenty for me. The more popular something gets on the internet, the more quickly it attracts hater-flys, and I can't stand me any flies. xD