Reviews for Animation: Blades

[Haggard]

Good movie

Usually I don't watch stick movies, since I think everything that can be done with sticks already has been done. But since this was requested in the RRC I gave it a try. And I must say, I am impressed by this flash.

Ok, nameless stick figures fighting each other sure has been done a bilion times before, but still your movie stands out from the huge crowd. The animations are very fluid and you also added some nice details here, like one of the red guys (the one that starts on the left side of the screen) stepping backwards a bit when he lands after his summersault for example. This looks pretty good and gives this flash that little "extra touch".

The music is pretty good as well, it fits nice to the fighting scenes.
The end was very sudden. The last guy just standing there and a little "Fin" popping up at the very bottom right corner, while the music still goes on. You should try to find a better ending. Maybe fading out the music and the whole screen slowly and display a "Replay"-Button.

{ Review Request Club }

Kwing responds:

Thanks for the review! I actually got Terkoiz to give me some feedback on this, and he said the biggest problems were the lack of dynamics, angles, and a V-Cam.

[NekoMika]

Pretty cool

Reminds me of the days of Xiao Xiao and when people actually made a lot of effort to produce a stick movie that wasn't newbie styled or bad. This was a really short piece though which is kind of sad since I would have loved to see how this would have gone had it been a much longer stick movie actually. It's still pretty cool but should also try more angles next time too I think.

The sound effects were nicely done and connect right when the action happens at all times. The song of choice seems to be pretty good but I think it could have been a slightly different choice to sync up with this short fifteen second piece of work. Not a bad choice but I guess a shorter piece that cuts to the action could have been nice too.

The animation was pretty nice and reminds me of Xiao Xiao anyways with more coloration added to the mix so it won't be as dull. Would have been funny if the one red one that fell and got pinned to the wall or one of the wires instead. I think it could have been interesting like that anyways.

Overall, interesting but really, really short.

Review Request Club

Kwing responds:

Thank you! I did put a lot of work into this, so I'm happy someone's noticed.

The song choice was never meant to be in sync since I was loading it externally to cut down on the memory usage. I thought it would be really lame to make most of the memory due to music I put into it.

I'd have loved to make it longer, but my combo ideas were sort of running dry.

[Xenophaje]

this seems unfinished... almost looks experimental

This is way too short first of all.
this is good, but where it stops is almost like a teaser. Build onto this, make it something epic and memorable. don't get me wrong - this is epic but just too short... way to short
you did a great job animating the bits that are here - transitions are great, action is cool, but where it stops... its kinda like you just hit the pause button, which is gonna piss people off.
Also the "fin" in the corner - its gonna take 60% of the people that view this a minute to notice that (some may very well think their computer froze given how you made this). At least make it loop or something.

add on to this and - if you can - add some plot to it, then it will be something people will really like.

-Review Request Club-

Kwing responds:

Thank you for the input. I actually felt that this animation was plenty long, seeing as there are three characters and they aren't all necessarily on the same side of the screen, meaning you can rewatch it to try and notice certain things you might have missed earlier on. I agree that the end was sudden, but that was why I put in a finishing combo instead of just making a single finishing move or anything like that. The reason it ended so soon was mainly because I couldn't think of a way to save the red guy after he made the super slow uppercut, so I just had the blue guy polish him off.

I agree that these things work better with a good story, but I'm horrible with cinematics.

[SkyeWint]

Considering what it is...

It's pretty good. I've always liked stick animations. The animation is very fluid, smooth, and having one of the girders fall worked quite well. I thoroughly enjoyed the fencing stance the blue stickman used towards the beginning.

My problems though come with the fact that it is too short, and it doesn't have any cutaway scenes of the stickmen. The swords also don't look that good, just lines. My other problem is that, if you're going to do a stickman animation, have it be unique from other ones. Just a fight won't quite work. While yes, it is cool, it isn't very original at all.

This could be improved. I hope that it will be, as it could be very cool in full.

Good luck!

-Review Request Club-
-SWINT-

Kwing responds:

I'm pretty good with writing storylines, but bad at delivering them into this fight scene or that fight scene. I suppose I might have been able to scrape something up, though. What I really didn't want to do though was put in a half-assed cliche anime-style storyline, since those are usually worse than no story at all.

As per it being short, the fact that all of the sticks are really good at blocking meant I constantly had to switch between stick figures while animating instead of animating a full combo and then another character getting hit with it. This made the animation process take much longer, and having a third character in the animation also made the animation process take very long. Remember that while the full animation may be 15 seconds, it's actually over 30 seconds of animation, since each character must be done separately.

[MrTroodon]

Yep.

Pretty friggen awesome.

Kwing responds:

Thanks!