Our film needs some unbiased criticisim

[Omninescience]

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/500680

A friend and I are looking for honest unbiased criticism, this is our first animation and we are still underdeveloped as animators, but by looking at this short piece, I'm sure there are things you experience animators can help in advice.

looking forward to your thoughts.

[Snowman]

Well I'm not expert in animating, but I watched it and I could share some insight.

So as a couple other Newgrounds users have stated, the intro credits lasted waaay too long for an animated short, I'd suggest cutting down on those greatly.
The spaceship seemed to makes its way in and out of the scene in sort of a glitchy way (in my opinion). I know you can clean up that movement by increasing the frame-rate, maybe try 30 since the short isn't too dependent on frame by frame drawings.
And the punch line...I couldn't even hear it when I played the video the first time. Definitely take another stab at recording that, and submit it to someone with an audio cleaner (or buy one yourself). After watching it again it sounds like maybe you did try to clean the audio up a bit but the *pop* effect from your voices remains, which could mean you were speaking a little too close to your mic.
One last quick thing. Since there's not much dialog, matching the voice up exactly with mouth movement might help add another attractive feature to the short.
http://www.garycmartin.com/mouth_shapes.html       <-- Mouth shapes example
www.goldwave.com/    <-- Audio cleaner I recommend

Anyways, I thought the sound effects were very audibly pleasing and fit the events of the scene well. The animation needs some work but it's not bad.

[crumb]

i liked the spaceship, the sounds and speed as it came in. It was ok, but did not really see anything (storywise). I would have liked some story

[Juggleballz]

I would make the ship shoot off into the night at the end, rather than slowly tween out. Make sure your squash and stretch the ship and add a trail of light or something, to add a bigger sense of speed if you decide to make it shoot off.

The expressions are okay, but some subtle blinking wouldn't go a miss, while the ship drops them off. They look too static and flat standing there.

Its too limited to really give any feedback on. Maybe that's one criticism...its too limited.
More frames in the electricity would make it much smoother. Also make it faster. It would look more realisitc.
Add some lighting effects to the ship as the electricity sparks and dissipates.
Having electricity wrap around the ball of light as it grows and roll around it would make it have more depth to it.
Add lighting effects to the people. Shadows flashing changing diectino on the ground etc. (check out the opening scenes to terminator 1 and 2 for inspiration)
More variation on the effects are needed as it is the only real piece of animation in this.
(check this out: http://media.photobucket.com/image/lightning%20ball%20animated%20gif/XxSeanxX13/Ball_Lightning.jpg - make sure you reference a lot of relevant things when designing or animating)

Oh and your opening credits takes way too long for such a small animation. A skip button would be nice here.

Speaking of the logos, they are pretty small and its hard to read the text, and also ILLSTRATE should be spelt ILLUSTRATE.

And make the Hit State of replay the entire REPLAY button, not just the written text. That can be annoying.(draw a box the size of replay text in your hit test frame of the button)

[Omninescience]

I just want to thank you guys for your time breaking down our animation and explaining to us what we could do better as animators.

First off, I think me and my buddy now understand and learn, having long credit introduction is a tedious process and they are not enjoyable to sit through.

crumb,
About the animation lacking story, your right, there isn't any story besides what is shown. When my friend wrote and animated the story, it was intended to be a comedy open for interpretation and suggestive, what happened on that ship is the audiences own personal creativity. I personally laughed when I saw it because it was ambiguous, and the expression shown by the two characters and their spoken dialog is the punchline to the animated short. Maybe sometime in the future me and my buddy can redo it again with more animation and more dialog.

Snowman,
When I cleaned up the animation, I couldn't do many things to it besides clean the spaceships look so it has more curvy lines than jaggy lines, the lighting on the grass and spaceship as they were being transported. I wanted to increase the frame-rates to 24 but the whole film was already done in 10 frames, when I tried, it complicated a lot of things, so I left it at ten. Then I ran into more problems when I wanted add effects like blur to the characters (as they were being transported) and glow (to the lightening and energy ball) but for some odd reason Flash didn't allow me.

Thanks for those two links, definantly gonna check those out, especially mouth shapes.

Juggleballz,
Yeah, Illustrate is spelled wrong, a typo on our part.

good point, perhaps I should alpha a box around Replay to make it more easier to click.

 

[Snowman]

Tell us when you submit an edited version on Newgrounds, if you get around to it