Reviews for Red

[DamonandSky]

Doesn't have to be flash man.

Newgrounds wants the site to expand what forms of animation and entertainment are put out; you can go and read the interviews with Tom Fulp.

Now for a review.

Animation was surprisingly better than I anticipated. 3D flash looks annoyingly clunky and the characters honestly look even less real with such robotic movement, little to no facial change, and of course the weird obscurity of how the surfaces of characters, objects, and environments look with this is just unbearably annoying.

This flash made it over that hill. Sure the fluidity of movement was still off, and the facial expression of the Wolf had hardly any change or such; but you could still feel the emotion behind him as he stumbled through the kitchen and even in the beginning scene as he drops the cigarette and bottle down carelessly.

The expansion of emotion was excellent with musical elements, the sound files played and slow camera motions, to the television set and picture, and finally to a gun pushed tightly against Wolf's cranium and the utterly devastating blow that comes afterward.

The slow motions worked and every sound and image fit perfectly into a small segment of a story where we meet the characters at the end, instead of the beginning.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

3.5/5.

Iznvm responds:

Hey man.. thanks for a good review.. There's a lot of things that I would definitely do different and I agree with almost everything you have said. But I'm not going to dwell on this work any longer. I'm going to focus my attention on the future and learn from the reviews and responses that this piece gets... I definitely want to convey more emotion through the face in the future, and thats honestly just up to me learning more about maya and facial controls / skin weights / and blend shapes. As for movement, everything was sort of "frame by frame." I notice that most successful 3d works use a great deal of rotoscope references which makes their final composition much more realistic and animated... I didn't do this, and simply moved my joint controllers around and set keyframes. In the future, I plan on doing so much more... I'm glad that this is out here for many to see though. I need the exposure and criticism if I'm every going to grow. And I guarantee, expect much more from me in this medium =D

Thanks=D

[crazeyal]

Let me start off by saying that this production is above the average NG animator. I enjoyed the concept, the mood, and the unique quality of the piece. Rather than just gush or harshly react (as others have done... ) Let me give some honest appraisal and suggestions. These will be based on my many years as a connoisseur of the entire run of NG and my own acting/writing experience.

Never assume your audience knows what you know. - As an animator, and anyone who watches older cartoons, seeing Tex Avery is a MUST. Not everyone watches the old cartoons anymore. Using the clips of Red (if you recreated them.. BRAH-VO!!) was great, but you assumed everyone watching has seen the original. The character of Wolf has fallen on hard times, but you make no reference to it ever being any other way. Was he a fan? Was he a co-star to Red? One or two cut-aways would have answered that, and made the character MUCH more tragic.

You've mentioned the limitations on rigging and expressions. One easy idea is the half faded overlay. One picture of him doing the wolf whistle, or the gigantic eyes and you would have shown that he COULD and DID have other expressions... But he no longer USES them.. No need to animate, just a static fade-in and fade-out, hovering and haunting him.

Methinks you'll make a GREAT animator. good luck!

[ruff1298]

It could use a little refinement. I may have a slow computer, and everything lags, but I can still understand the effect you're going for, delayed sounds or not.

I liked the fact that the Wolf still had on his fancy suit from all those nights ago. I would have liked it better if it were showing some signs of ageing or decay, to give a bit more signal that the Wolf hasn't been doing so well. If it had been just a few nights ago from when he watched Red at the club, I would have appreciated a bit more clarification about the present date.

Smooth animation. It may have been a little choppy at times, but overall the Wolf and the bottles moved fine.

The ending seemed like a bit of a cop-out with how the Wolf just suddenly had that gun in his hands. Cartoon physics may justify this, but the way he has it after the cut without a shot of him pulling it out bothered me.

The music was also a problem, to me, at least. I would have enjoyed it better if it were just silence, and the ambient sounds of the Wolf's apartment. A happy tune from one of Red's shows playing on the radio might have fit better with the sombre mood, if only to provide a contrast.

Overall, nice idea and execution. It'd get a "Pass" from me if I were the teacher, but it won't warrant a second watching or attention further than this review.

Iznvm responds:

heh its probably your computer or internet connection causing the lag... there shouldnt be any lag with this kind of file unless its on the viewers side, which I can't really account for that. If you've ever watched the real cartoon that its based on, the wolf pulls out 2 identical guns from no where and kills himself at the end (in a much more comical sense), so I kind of pulled from that.
I've had some people tell me that the music was a bit of a distraction. I liked, but I'll definitely consider a more natural sound design for future works... and I had originally textured the wolf with a scuffed up suit, but had some problems with the texture tearing during movement, so I went with solids due to time. I definitely agree that it would have been more effective with scuffiness, but I didn't have the time to fix this.=(

Thanks for the review =)

[MooTHeTerrorist]

not quality

[120501]

It was very well animated and the graphics were quite. Obviously a lot of work went in to this. I just seemed to be lacking something. I'm not quite sure what this was. Perhaps part of it was that the movie didn't seem to fully establish what the wolf's relationship with red was. I'm left to assume he was in love with her, ended up killing her, then missed her and took his own life. However, I could be way off on this. Could this not have been established at least to some extent in the movie? Perhaps he could have looked at a picture of the two of them together, rather than just watching a news report of her on TV.

121MB is a very large file size. I seemed to have to wait a long time for this to load. It would have been nice if you could have done a little more to the preloader. At first I wasn't sure why all I saw was a black screen. It wasn't until I hovered the mouse over the movie that I saw the loading bar at the bottom. Could you not have placed a visible loading bar there whether you hovered over it or not? There was no way of telling if it was fully loaded within the movie itself, my browser was responsible for informing me of this. I feel that there needed to be something within the movie that would allow you to have seen this, as the loading bar was just a striped yellow block on a black background and there was no real way of being 100% sure that it had reached the end.

Hearing a voice on the television was a nice surprise, as it was otherwise a vocal-free movie. The music was a good choice for the most part, but I felt that it became too over-dramatic when the wolf got a beer from the fridge and it wasn't until he switched the TV on that it calmed back down.

Iznvm responds:

I've accepted all criticism up until this one, because all the other criticism was actually good... this is just not... I'm well aware that you have no clue what youre talking about and want everything handed to you on a silver platter.
An establishment of their relationship was made.... you didn't have to know the entire history, you just had to know that there was a relationship. And it reveals itself more and more as the movie goes on...
As for the technical things, you obviously are clueless. There was NO way for me to put a preloader. It's not a flash file or swf that I can just put a preloader in front of, and if it was, the wait would be 10 times worse to watch it. This movie is embedded the same way that youtube movies are. It starts playing automatically once a certain amount has been loaded and continues to load the rest as it plays - streamed.
121mb is extremely small for something like this. This is a 1280x720 mp4 - 720p - HD. Getting it any smaller of a file size would have severely reduced the quality. I'm not even happy with this quality, if it were up to me, you'd be waiting for a 2.5gig movie to load. So to answer your question again, NO, I could not have put a loading bar. If it took a while to load, congratulations, your internet is at fault.
As for the music, I agree. It becomes overpowering at that point, which is something that I should have noticed earlier, but at this point, I'm just going with it.