Amazing for a flash animation...
That was great! I am surprised that was all possible in flash! only con was the story line and it was a bit short apart from that good job.
Reviews for "The Hunt: O.P. Pt. 1"
RobsH66 responds:
well keep in mind there's still a third part to be released. It's actually pretty long for a flash movie...i believe it's about 12 minutes long.
Utterly brilliant
What a great piece of work this is. I laughed my ass off when the fat guy appeared, I hope he's in the mext episode :)
I liike it! Buut...
It pretty much seems like the team is comprised of you and your friends (I'm guessing from names in the credits and familiarity-I remember doing that type of shit with my friends, except none of us knew shit about Flash). That's all well and good, but explain why they are there. I mean, you got all these special ops guys who I'm assuming were the military sent in (as you mentioned in the prologue), but why the fat kid in the jeans and stretched T-shirt. Is he a scientist? He can't put his arms down (or reach his mouth...), what was he doing there in the first place. "Free Willy" parody was funny though. While it was very flawed when you break everything down, it was still fun enough once you watched it all at once. I'm gonna watch part two, so if something's answered there, then I've totally got my foot in my mouth. Good Job, though.
RobsH66 responds:
That's correct, everyone in the movie is based on their real life counterpart (including Tonky, the little alien zombie guys, and the big monster...in fact the monster's face is the guy's yearbook picture :P ). It states that fact in the ending credits after Part 3, but it's not hard to figure it out beforehand.
As for explaining their origins and reasons for being there... the team's reason for being sent in was explained in the prologue, but I can understand why Tonky's being there would throw you off. He's really just there because he was part of the team in the original Hunt (the movie this was originally intended to be the sequel to... I've already talked about that in another reply). His only real purpose is for comic relief, and nobody's ever quite sure why he's there in the first place.
And if you also meant that we should have developed the characters more, to be honest, none of the characters were ever meant to be especially deep. I know it's always better to be able to relate to the characters, but we just felt that the movie was already long enough as it was, and explaining their backgrounds and personalities would just consume more time. Of course, we tried to stick a very small amount of character development in there: the fact that Tonky's a little wimpy bastard who runs away at any sight of danger, for example. But we just felt that overall, it was best to just keep things simple as far as character development and background goes, and focus on the action and events of the storyline.
Impressive but flawed
This is a very solid piece of work, but its flaws really drag it down, which is a shame because there are some great ideas here. My suggestions: First, if you ditch all the silly music and just put in some dramatic instrumentals or loops, it would not only bring the file size waaaay down but I think it would be more dramatic, anyway. As has been said, but make the legs jointed, to allow for a more natural walking animation. Trim the credits, they look good but are overly long. Finally, and I think this would be the biggest improvement, ditch at least of the characters, and I don't mean the fat dude. They are all fairly generic anyway. The animation and storytelling would both improve. I know that it is too late to do that even if you wanted to but hey. Good job anyway. I really liked the explosion effect when the building blew up. You can tell this took a lot of work.
RobsH66 responds:
Thank you, those are some good suggestions. I agree, it probably would have been better to use sound loops than actual songs for several of the scenes. The problem is, I didn't even discover the usefulness of sound loops over MP3s until I was nearing the final stage of the movie. By then, I had already gone to so much trouble picking out music and syncing the movie around the song that I felt it would be more trouble than it's worth to go back and replace all the songs with loops. However, I ran into some file size problems with Part 3 of the series when I was first splitting them up- it was slightly over 7MB big, and the limit for this site is 5MB (6 at most). So I tracked the problem down to the ending credits song, which was pretty much unnecessary and was adding on about 3MB to the movie. So I got rid of the song and replaced it with a good loop, and it brought the file size down to 4MB. So I've definitely learned from that mistake and will be using more sound loops and less actual songs in my future movies.
I've already discussed the animation problems, so I won't get into that. As for the number of characters... let's just wait until Part 3 is released to talk about that ;)
Anyways, I've learned a lot during the production of this movie, and the comments I have received have also been very useful. Rest assured, I'm listening to what everyone has to say and I will definitely put this advice to good use in my next animation (which is already well into production). Thanks again for the suggestions.
Smooth
That was great. The opening credits were about as long as the movie, but it was worth it. Great!