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Ballad of the Reaper

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Author Comments

PLEASE READ BEFORE WATCHING: Due to extreme clipping, I've been forced to turn the volume of the music down quite a lot. Because of this, you might want to turn your speakers's volume up for the best experience (there's a sound effect in the beginning that is quite loud, though, but after that there's just low-volume music).


A story about death, told through drawings and music.


This is a collaboration between myself (RandomStar) and a friend of mine (PLaU). I came up with the story, directed the drawings, composed original music and put the whole thing together in flash, while PLaU did the drawings. It has been in the works longer than I think any of us are willing to admit, but the final result is here now and I hope you will enjoy it!


This flash has truly been a bitch to make; everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. This includes symbols being swapped or appearing where they're not supposed to be, movie lagging seemingly without reason, music clipping and ultimately forcing me to decrease the quality of it, filesize becoming HUGE which led to a lot of compressing before I finally managed to get it below 10 MB, and flash has overall not been cooperating with me at all. But it's done now, and even though technical problems has made the final result not as good as I had hoped, I'm glad it's done.


Also, if you vote, I'd appreciate if you'd take some time to review it as well, I do read all reviews and probably will respond to all too. Thank you :)

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If there was something to be said it would be this

The animation, or rather fine artwork, pencil and pen, hand drawn it take it, was superb and was very well reusable. You did not have to make a different picture for every second as most people. The music was divine, and it went really well with the flow of the story. It was slow, but intensified over time to follow the story. The music itself was touching but the part that really got me is when he pretty much said im not here for you, but your child. That made me feel miserable, as this movie should. I see no way that I could score you less, than a 10.

RandomStar responds:

Wow, that's quite a review, thank you very much! :D Nothing could make us happier than to know we actually managed to touch people emotionally with our work, we're very glad you liked it!

It was deep

Deeper then a lot of these tools think, thanks for stickin it out through the problems

RandomStar responds:

Deep indeed. And I'm glad I did finish it despite the trouble.

Very Well Done

I enjoyed the detail of the art (I belive it's pencil?) and the great use of the Ken Burns effect. It gives a great feeling of sympathy for the poor mother as she loses her newborn.I did notice that in a couple of scenes you decided to reuse certain drawings to complete the plot. I also noticed that the first drawing of the reaper differed from the rest of your drawings mainly in the face/hood.

Overall, I enjoyed this. It brought me back to High School Television Productions Class. I would enjoy seeing more films like this, it seems to suit your skills well. Some advice is that you could use a little less detail for less important aspects. Might help with that file size. I might also suggest that you create a character on a seperate sheet of paper, giving you a chance to iron out the details.

8/10 and 4/5

RandomStar responds:

Thank you for the kind words and advice, if we ever make another film in this style we'll be sure to consider it!

WOOT! ALL MY 5 R BELONG TO THIS!

Yeah, rated it 5/5, cause i like your style of using drawings, no voices and using music as a key component to tell the story. (yes, i know you can't animate). The story also tells itself just through the picture, so anyone would understand it.

RandomStar responds:

Thank you kind sir! :D Originally there was meant to be dialouge cause I didn't think the story would be clear enough without it, but turns out it worked just fine anyway, PLaU is really talented, being able to tell the story through her drawings alone.

"Like"

Nice drawing style,... now if only you could animate them and give them more life. Story was a little predictable but ok...

RandomStar responds:

Haha, funny you should say that, the first reason why we decided to publish this as a still picture movie is because none of us are that good at animating :P But then I thought it would be more original than other flashes if there were only still pictures, so it's kind of our own little style. But glad you liked it anyway!

Credits & Info

Views
7,249
Faves:
8
Votes
7
Score
3.69 / 5.00

Uploaded
Dec 29, 2010
10:41 AM EST
Genre
Drama