heyooo
so i thought the joke itself wasnt that good and kinda dragged on, but damn thats some fine animation skills you got there. Ive seen your earlier projects and this is a massive step up. Just make sure next time you voice act you make it less obvious that your reading off a script, put some emotion into it.
cool.
It's good, but the voice acting is sort of... off.
Relatively good animation but
The voice was a tad slow for my liking. Better than anything I've uploaded though :P
Great animation
The Good: Character animation was top notch.
The Bad: The big problem is in the writing, pacing, and presentation.
I am not familiar with your comic strip, but I feel like this was probably just a drawn out twin of one of them. The joke seemed to be trying to build up to some grand joke in the end, when what you really meant for us to find funny was the wordy speech the hamster gave and the big deal he was making. That might work for a comic strip, but you can only get so far with a contained situation like that. If you do, then the actual script has to be funny, as in the protagonist needs to make the jokes happen and not just overreact.
This goes hand in hand with pacing. You need to get a little smarter in terms of what get's said and how fast it needs to be said. Because your voices don't have a hook quality (i.e why Salad Fingers can talk so slowly yet remain so popular) you need to speed up the delivery and pick less wordy sentences (I'm referring to the script outside the purposefully wordy bit) Having white hamster say "Hey joe" twice, having brown hamster say "I've done it" twice and so slowly breaks any chance for momentum.
Lastly, this is not a single panel comic strip, and so we as an audience of animation expect more variation in the world you set your flash in. What you have here is a single, simple, background, which when compared to the effort you put into the character animation, seems half-assed. An animation needs to take you places. Close-ups and spinning clouds will only take you so far.
Thank you for the extremely well thought out review. I feel like you've hit the nail on the head, as far as my strengths and weaknesses. I am definitely a "comics" guy trying to move into the world of animation, and so I've noticed a lot of my instincts as far as pacing goes do not translate very well to the animated medium. I definitely put the most time into the character animation in this video out of everything. My next video I'm working on will have no dialogue, which I'm hoping will force me to better familiarize myself with pure cinematic timing. Thanks again!
Interesting indeed.
Although you clearly spent a good amount of time on this animation, the motion of the characters wasn't very realistic. While it was quite fluid FBF, it lacked the ease and timing that would add to the realism.
Take a look at this: bit.ly/g4FLM
You can see that the team of animators that created that cutscene put lots of effort into animating it. However, the movements are extremely choppy and unrealistic. Learning to ease into and out of different poses can help make the frame by frame more natural. The easiest way to do this is to insert one more frame in between the first frame and the second frame, and the last frame and the second to last frame. Then inbetween the added frames, and repeat this process until the motion looks realistic.
You put lots of time and effort into making the animation, and I think it really made a difference. But no matter how much time you put in, a good understanding of motion can always make an animation look better.