It's your first. It's way better than most firsts.
Notice to the folks:
I think those of you who are giving this guy a hellish time need to read the earlier reviews. This is his first animation.
I repeat, this is his FIRST, animation, on flash.
Now, for a first, that ain't all that bad. Kindly stop giving the kid a heart attack, and have some kind of appreciation for, at the very least, that fact.
Even the "bests" on newgrounds have a starting point, and it's not always impressive. It's where they WENT after that point.
Half of their firsts never even found the front page.
Check those out some time, if you don't believe me.
That being said, I won't deny that it's not the best out there, but how many flash animation firsts have you seen that had zero movement, zero attempt to make any depiction of a character before tossing him into the mix, zero attempt at voices at all... O-o And I've seen a few things of that like hit the front page before. Were they first attempts? Not usually, but every fable finds its fans.
I couldn't figure out head nor tail what was up in those.
(Aka, Chat bubbles that vanished before you were done reading them.)
And ya know what? I've seen some of those hit the front page. HECK, I've occassionally seen one of those "cawkjokes and dick cracks" flashes hit the front page, and half of the time they weren't even funny.
So in light of that, I really can't give this author a bad score. They're new, and they've tried to do the things that make half of us cringe, and that only a few animators have ever gotten 100% right.
Lip to voice
I've only ever seen 4 - 6 artists get character-to-voice mouth-synching spot on, and half of em are animating sticks (and doing so very well I might add!).
Lip to voice attempt did exist, however shabby it may or may not have been. He tried. It shows. O-o Paint wont get you too far though. Might wanna think about getting an illustrator program, though I don't know what's compatible.
Movement existed!
Without a crappy skipping quality, although the movements were abrupt, and jagged in several parts of the animation, most notably when that guy at the start is smoking.
Storyline... ehhh... xD
Some basic degree of storyline. But not much. :P Ya lost a point or two there.
Did he try? Maybe, maybe not. However, I don't think that half of us would fire off a story that we considered downright awesome on our first submission, and it seems that some of us have forgotten that this guy is doing this ALONE. Some of the best storylines on newgrounds were only possible because there's a full team working on their production.
That and, yeah, sure, the ending and how anti climactic it was. :) Could've used just a bit of a closing part, even if it were only one of those stereotypical western camera views from the dead guy's resting place looking up at the victors facade as he turns and- you know where I'm going with that. xD
That aside, how many of you can tell me that yer first got this far? You can call it a fluke, but that's neglecting to mention that your own didn't... >.>
O-o That, and if this is his starting point, then he's not doing half as badly as some of these comments are making it seem.
...I mean telling him not to open flash? That's pretty messed up... Look around before you post, and see that for a first, this is impressive.
You'll get a 7 from me. I think it's pretty fair.
If I were to tell ya how you've done so far, you've got a ways to go, but yer not doing badly. Most people avoid that "walking towards" view of a character with every fiber of their being due to the difficulty of getting it animated in a semi-realistic manner. But you tried. I don't see it often.
(xP you didn't quite hit that part, but if ya look around long enough on this thing, you'll eventually find a video that you can probably glean something from. :o)
So in summary,
Animation - Not bad for yer first. Kudo's, but try to get some feel into those movements. That arm went from moving forward to jetlining back during the smoking scene.
storyline - xD Needs work. Hate to say it, but lots of it. :)
Voices - might need a new mike.
Try - nice.
