Fear Hole 3

[Scythemantis]

http://www.bogleech.com/flash/FEARHOLE3-BLACKSLUG.html

Featuring a look at the other side of the Fear Hole as one monster's ego leads him to our world to do unspeakable things to Dan the Janitor.

PROBLEMS:

9.44 megabytes. I don't know why, unless it's just the sheer volume of art. I drew a lot for this one. A lot. Heavy experimentation with poses and perspectives.

There's also one scene that gets choppy because of too many animated symbols, but it doesn't screw the sync up for anyone so far. Shouldn't detract much and I can just fix it later.


Stay after the credits for a stupid "egg!"

[Tyler C. Hendrix]

Very good. It was pretty funny. I only have a few complaints, if you can even call them that.

The voice acting was a little...not good. They were fine, but they weren't executed to their full potential, or something like that. You can probably do better than I can, in any case.

The drawings were good, but the animation just wasn't doing it for me. You mostly just moved symbols, not redraw them. I mean, I can't blame you, but it just looks better to do the animation traditionally.

[Scythemantis]

This was actually the first cartoon where I did start doing some frame-by-frame redraws, but most of it was animating Slug who's largely a silouhette anyway.

[Kisai]

This one, and the other two you have aren't too bad. The art itself comes off as more original.

The non-humans voices are a bit irritating to listen to though, it seems like they were just run through a filter and not cleaned up and normalized.

As for the file size. I went an looked at the file breakdown and it looks like you exported most of the sounds as 44.1Khz 128kbps mp3's. Which is fine for music, but overkill for voices in a flash cartoon (which can get away with fairly low quality audio). If you used the default 16kbps 44khz mp3 setting by ticking the "override" box, you'd get a flash file around 4.8MB. However... your cartoon is also a bit over 9 minutes, so 9meg for 9 minutes is actually not too bad. You might have wanted to break it into two acts if you were to put it on newgrounds.

So largely the complaints with your cartoon all resolve around audio. The voices could probably be improved, though they do seem to fit, albeit unexciting. It does seem to run a little long, or the pace is a little slow.

Something about it reminds me of Bonus stage, but I can't place what.

[Scythemantis]

I did the override thing and it now publishes at 7 MB. I didn't even realize it was 9 minutes, I know that's quite long for episodic flash. I actually cut out a good fourth of the script before animating, too.


And indeed, I wanted to use someone else to voice the two barfly monsters but I didn't have access to anyone with a good microphone or spare time so I just did a couple of throwaway voices (they were scripted as having specific personas that I can't pull off). Someday I'll go back and have them redubbed by someone.

[Kisai]

I did the override thing and it now publishes at 7 MB. I didn't even realize it was 9 minutes, I know that's quite long for episodic flash. I actually cut out a good fourth of the script before animating, too.


And indeed, I wanted to use someone else to voice the two barfly monsters but I didn't have access to anyone with a good microphone or spare time so I just did a couple of throwaway voices (they were scripted as having specific personas that I can't pull off). Someday I'll go back and have them redubbed by someone.

Hmm, I'll be honest and say I reverse engineered your file with something, then recompressed it with flash 8 with the "compress flash" box ticked. I read your post in another thread that suggests you were using flash 6 or 7, so it might not have the option. That's how I got 4.8MB.

I do find it hard to believe you can't find anyone to do voices. Usually all you have to do is post an "auditions" thread somewhere and people jump on it. Though typically it's harder to find female voices than male.

[Scythemantis]

Well gosh, I definately need an update then...I have flash MX that was given to me on disk, not sure where/how I would get anything newer with my budget.

I guess I should make a thread for voice auditions at least on my own forum.

[Jonwah]

I enjoyed that. It was quite long and may have done better with a faster pace, but it's alright with the pace it's at.
I agree that you could benifit from new voices, a quick auditions thread would fix that surely.
Everyone loves the sound of their own voice.

[Scythemantis]

So the macromedia site still offers updates to Flash MX...anyone know if those do anything for the compression? Or is there perhaps some free program out there that JUST compresses flash files?

Paying for only one feature I need seems a little silly.

[Kisai]

Your best option if you don't have flash 8, really is to wait for flash 9 to be released then buy it. Otherwise in the meantime I'd suggesting getting someone with flash 8 to recompress it for you. They only need to have your .fla file and the same fonts used.

(reverse engineering it, however is not the same thing, as reverse engineering software is approximiately the equivilant of re-tracing the entire thing, and with the exception of using it to pull pieces out of files that you lose/fair-use it's not very good.)

I'm still waiting for flash 9 for mac, I have a PC with 8 on it, but I've lost more stuff on the PC altogether. I bought 2GB of ram and STILL run out of memory doing flash stuff. So I've been learning compromises in animation.