Reviews for Animation: Blades

[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.

[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.

[Soapbubble]

Good animation

Now, I might be biased when it comes to these flashes, but either way:

Your animation style is very smooth, much better than about 70-80% of the stick flash movies submitted to Newgrounds every month. They've got a natural flow, and the graphics look as good as they can, I guess.

My big issue is that there's nothing to this 15-second flash, other than three random sticks fighting. There's no backstory, there's no goal, there's nothing to it, they're just fighting, which seems rather meaningless and pointless to me.

I'm also not sure what the background is, looking at it it just seems like something slapped on to give the flash another level of depth? I see the broken house and car, but the perspective would mean this guys are standing really slanted.

There's no replay button at the end, and it doesn't loop. The music you put in was pretty epic, though, and fit well with the scene of the battle. Try to add a replay button and add some story to it, make it longer. This is not original at all. I can easily see a lot of work went into making this, considering how smooth it is, but to me, it just doesn't cut it.

Review Request Club

Kwing responds:

The down button is as effective a go-back-to-start button as any, so I didn't think a replay button was really necessary.

I have considered maybe putting in a prologue with one of the characters scavenging in the apocalyptic background and then being ambushed by the other two, but I never really gave it a whack. Maybe that would have given the animation more cinematic value and story.