Matazone's movie Reviews on Newgrounds

[Enter The Portal Ep.1]

Nice animation but...

it doesn't really go anywhere.

Your skills with Flash are pretty good but you're not using them to their full potential at the moment. Try to get a clear idea of what message you want to convey to your audience then set out to convey that.

This animation is quite a large file what what is essentially a very simple piece of storytelling. The dead files are returning from the grave, fine, but what do they do once they go back through the portal? What you've given us here is the first line of a story without anything more and it leaves the viewer thinking 'and then... Oh, that's it.'

Next time you make an animation try to see it from the audience's point of view. You've obviously worked very hard on the visuals but they don't achieve as much as that work should. This animation could convey what it has in half the time, which would then leave the remaining half to show what happens when they get to the other side... You could have them lumbering ominously through the dark, the lights come on and all the successful .swfs are holding a welcome back party for them, the zombie .swfs stand around looking embarassed, the end.

Something like that would have given the plot a feeling of resolution rather than leaving it open ended.

Actually, that's a pretty good punchline, I might use that in one of my animations...

Have fun and good luck with the next one!

Popeofdope responds:

The reason i didn't resolve the plot is because of what is comeing up. theres definatly not going to be any welcome signs when these zombies enter the portal. very far from that. there coming for revenge, this next episode will be alot longer and i will have fixed the problems that there were with the first one (rough animation/sound) It's gonna be good, thanx for your blessing

[2 dudes]

Simple but made me laugh

That's a very simple idea but executed really well and the timing is perfect.

As a tip, if you want to get rid of the boxes around transparent .gifs you can turn them into clips then put a layer over the top of them. Right click on the layer name and turn it into a mask. Paint over the areas you want the viewer to see and then lock both the layers to see the effect. Have fun!

Mata
http://www.matazone.co.uk/theotherside.html

mr-wheatley responds:

i cant see the boxes here..weird.

[Insane Clown Posse Show]

Seriously

That's a huge filesize for something that's really not a 'movie'. When you publish your movie in Flash go to File>Publish then play with the optimisation options to reduce the sound quality and the picture quality.

I can't say I'm really bothered either way by ICP but I thought I'd give this a look because I figured you'd have to be doing something interesting with that size a file. You've taken up a lot of space without really doing anything interesting with it so I gave this a very low rating.

[CF.EXE Intro (team)]

A good start

A good intro.

If you're having trouble with the animation running too slowly then try using less mid-range alpha loops, ie. the partially see-through smoke. Making things look semi-transparent uses up a lot of processing power and slows down animations a lot. There's no point complaining about people having slow computers if you haven't got the animation set up in a way that will get the most out of their machine!

The style is good and the music works really well with it. I would suggest that if you're going to use this often you put a bit more text on the screen, it's fine for one viewing but after that would quickly get repetitive.

'Hope you take this as constructive criticism!

Zero-EXE responds:

Thanks, Im still kinda a newb at this.

[Rapunzel: out-takes]

Something different

Hiya,

Nice to see someone trying to do something different on the web for a change.

You should be able to up the sound quality on the speech without altering the file size too much. Maybe you should get hold of a piece of software called 'Cool Edit', it's got a great filter that gets rid of background noise.

Best wishes with future work,

Mata

[sillygoth teasertrailor 1]

That's it?

It looks lovely, but if all that download time is just for about twenty seconds (if that) then what are the actual full length download times going to be like?

Mata
http://www.mata zone.co.uk/theotherside.html