Artcow rcdart / Rory Cummings-Dise - Tranny Fetishist who Torpedoed a Potential Animation Career

[CoralBlueNumber]

So I watched the short. I feel like it's decent(not great but okay at the same time). It does have rory's usual style for Strawberry which I feel works well for every character ,except our protag imo(at least bodywise).
I feel storywise, it made me dislike our title character. She clearly marries a dude for money and then gets bored of him even tho he doesn't come off or is drawn creepy(honestly he's adorable in design ngl) and genuinely loves her. I feel it could have ended way way better.
Tiger is adorable tho.

 

[flower hat]

the music is probably the best thing abt this, as in... its not as bad as everything else... its just a generic beat with some barely audible audience cheering at the beginning as she tosses someone by their hair a bit, someone who doesnt seem like they even wanna be there. and then some equally generic Sad Music^tm in the end, with what sounds like stock sound effects for things, like the car screech...

i assume were meant to find this strawberry chick sexy but its really hard when the only indication of it is her doing a very badly animated hair flip and her muscles being shown to the camera surrounded by sparkled with p fucking bad sparkle sound affects holy shit
its possible to present the idea that a character is considered sexy, even if she's not conventionally attractive or anyone's personal taste, but this wasnt done well here

the thing just feels not finished, like an animatic , with the bare minimum visuals and audio just to get an idea cross. i really hope thats the case, and this isnt a final finished piece

Thanks for going in on the descriptions so I could enjoy this as little as everyone else here

You read it here first: KF cares more about the poor, oppressed deafs than our patron saint of diversity. It's not hard to close caption two sentences and make a subtitle file. If you're lazy and have money you can even get cheap professional captioning that includes audio descriptions. Sites like Rev are out there.

Then again, having witnessed the artistic stylings of Trans Rights Activist Rory, I think Accessibility Vanguard Rory is a tragedy best left avoided.

Spoiler: What might have been

I considered finishing this up more, but that felt almost like cheating since half-assed sketches are the truest homage to Rory's craft.

 

[fishercat]

Strawberry looks like she's gonna fall over at any second.

 

[Porca Puttana]

I don't know if anyone noticed in how the first scene was just devoid of sound effects? Like the lack of animation could have propped up a bit more with a thud thrown in or something. Or you know - actually animate a fight.

 

[Meowthkip]

I never thought the reason I'd finally make an account here would be to revive the RCDart thread, but here we are.

The Strawberry video is finally upon us: https://vimeo.com/266200432

Spoiler: Slight powerlevel, I'm fucking deaf

It was pretty anticlimactic for me. Nothing about it seems outstanding or awful. It just looks like what all the art she made about it before was promoting. So maybe her style's stagnated and won't continue on a rapid downward spiral like before now that she's largely offline?

:powerlevel: I'm extremely hard of hearing so I can't actually tell if it's unpleasant to watch thanks to the soundtrack or something. The credits include voice acting. I've got to admit, I'm dying of curiosity. Who saw Strawberry's design and thought, I have to voice this? What kind of dialogue would fit with a short with this kind of tone and pacing? Holding out for someone with working ears to enlighten me about what happened here.

When the tiger gets bigger, its size becomes wildly inconsistent. In some shots it's actual tiger size, and in other's it's the size of a large dog.

There's only a handful of characters in this short and one of them just changes size randomly.

 

[Oupalaylay]

How are you suppose to like the main character? I feel more for the man who lost everything because some gold digger got bored of him.
Also, the voice acting is probably a classmate of Rory as hiring a real voice actor for two lines would be just be ridiculous, in cost and time managing. I honestly think it would have been better not to have any voices, as it made the character seem even more unsympathetic and we would have understood she got bored of her life without her telling us. I doubt a teacher or classmate did not told her that, but she didn't want to listen.
In term of animation, I guess this is what you would expect for a second year movie? Most of the calart shorts I've seen that weren't final year movies are kind of choppy. In this case, it's still too stiff because it lacks anticipation, stretch and squash, ample movements, etc. , like the hair moving at the beginning. You CAN make an animation appealing and yet not put many frames in it. This isn't the case here.
It may be better than before, but it's still very mediocre.

 

[smallwife]

Gotta do a hard disagree with everyone calling it "decent"-- it looks worse than some of the animating my friends did back when we were in high school.

 

[Lez]

The fight is slow and boring and Julius Pringles did nothing wrong and deserves better. He was just (probably) looking for love again after his wife died, because that is what she would have wanted - him to find happiness once more.

 

[MelancholyArtist]

Hello, farmer that has been watching this thread since the beginning but hasn't posted in here until now, here.

The voice acting is hilariously bad in my opinion. Even though there wasn't much of it, the amount that I COULD hear - which wasn't much because I had my volume on max and still couldn't make out anything after "this isn't what I want"- was horrendous. Their delivery was actually quite bad and unprofessional, there was absolutely no emotion in any of her words. She didn't sound upset, she didn't sound bored, she sounded like someone was reading off a script. Like she did one take and just went with it. This is relevant because it's primarily the fault of the director to DIRECT the actor/actress to the right feelings they are supposed to show. How is the actress supposed to know what sounds better if they don't have anyone to tell them?

On the animation side of things, I absolutely LOATHE the scritchy sctratchy lines so much. It looks so unprofessional and amateurish. I've seen films from first years, second years and up from CalArts and most of them had cleaner lineart or they made a stylistic choice that worked for the scenery and had a reason for being as such. But the lines in this animation were just...gross and I could barely watch it due to my overwhelming aggravation over the scratchiness of the lines. Not to mention it looks like a watered down Steven Universe style and boy am I sick and tired of seeing that style. I won't comment much on the story as others have already pointed out, I just ended up really disliking Strawberry in the end.
The animation was too heavy and as someone already pointed out, just felt like it was a glorified animatic. For being in their second year of a highly looked upon school like CalArts, you'd think she would have more skill than this.

 

[Berserker Armor]

so other than the fact the whole "animation" was flat like colors that had some filters or something over to give lighting or shading of some sort and felt like an animatic and i thought about the words "if i was a professor and i saw this i would ask my student what the fuck" but. obviously the inconsistent sizes with the tiger and other things. one thing i did not see mentioned was the car scene.

what is going on.


also that lip sync to the voice acting in the bath scene and the car towards the end looked like a naruto animation by a kid back in 2010 done in ms paint. plus the movement of her hair as she talks at the end of the animation felt.. bad.

 

[Upsy Daisy]

Oh no, Strawberry feels bad about taking advantage of a kindly rich man. Guess she's going to eschew her greed--*Strawberry starts stuffing cash into her suitcase*--oh. Fuck this bitch.

Also, when she "whips her hair around" in the first scene, her hair doesn't even fucking move. Kinda defeats the point.

EDIT: I just realized a huge problem with this cartoon that feeds into everything else: telling rather than showing. Strawberry says out loud "this isn't what I want" when we could see it on her face that it wasn't. The rich guy had "MONEY" hovering above him in big bubble letters when it was apparent enough from his design that he was rich. Even in the first seconds of animation, we have sparkles "telling" us that Strawberry is attractive, rather than seeing what supposedly makes her attractive, her strength. Half of the wrestling happens offscreen or with her opponent mostly out of shot.

 

[Meowthkip]

Oh no, Strawberry feels bad about taking advantage of a kindly rich man. Guess she's going to eschew her greed--*Strawberry starts stuffing cash into her suitcase*--oh. Fuck this bitch.

Also, when she "whips her hair around" in the first scene, her hair doesn't even fucking move. Kinda defeats the point.

EDIT: I just realized a huge problem with this cartoon that feeds into everything else: telling rather than showing. Strawberry says out loud "this isn't what I want" when we could see it on her face that it wasn't. The rich guy had "MONEY" hovering above him in big bubble letters when it was apparent enough from his design that he was rich. Even in the first seconds of animation, we have sparkles "telling" us that Strawberry is attractive, rather than seeing what supposedly makes her attractive, her strength. Half of the wrestling happens offscreen or with her opponent mostly out of shot.

Also her opponent is mismatched with her weight class.

She's just throwing around an unconscious woman like a ragdoll.

 

[boat_rocker]

Like someone else said before, how are we supposed to feel bad for Strawberry...again? It would make her interesting if she maybe owned up to her mistakes to her husband instead of running away like a coward. The guy wasn't being a creep, abusive, or mean to her, so I don't have any sympathy for her since Rory doesn't even give us a reason to besides she's...bored I guess. I'm not even sure. It makes Strawberry look entitled bitch more than anything.

Rory for sure isn't a writer and is barely an animator. Does anyone have examples of her classmates doing the same project? I'd love to see them.

 

[IceGray]

Rory falls really short of this when her senior does exposition and another family concept better.

Jido is about a grandpa messaging his granddaughter, made by a fourth year student.

Storm 7 News, a film by second year animation student.

 

[CumStainedFloorTiles]

It's a minor gripe about the animation but why is everything so pinkish orange? It could be an interesting pallet but Rory somehow makes it boring and ugly.

 

[NoFeline]

Rory falls really short of this when her senior does exposition and another family concept better.

Jido is about a grandpa messaging his granddaughter, made by a fourth year student.

Storm 7 News, a film by second year animation student.

I saw such nice comments on Jido, so I went to see what people had to say about Strawberry....
Comments are disabled.

 

[Tlazolli]

I saw such nice comments on Jido, so I went to see what people had to say about Strawberry....
Comments are disabled.

Does that mean other Calarts classmates are bullying Rory or Rory just doesn’t want feedback because she’s an entitled piece of crap?

 

[IdaRita]

I'm a bit disappointent. Expected something more hilariously bad from Rory or that she will give us her new portfolio adress in credits.
This is just meh. For student film it's not that bad, not good either, but not bad.
I like that Strawberry, as it was already pointed out, comes as really unlikeable opportunist. Probably unintentionally. It's so Rory.

poor girl.

 

[kidsquid]

Rory falls really short of this when her senior does exposition and another family concept better.

Jido is about a grandpa messaging his granddaughter, made by a fourth year student.

Storm 7 News, a film by second year animation student.

Storm 7 News gave me a couple of laughs and Jido made me a bit tearful at the end, but Strawberry? I felt nothing but contempt for the titular character.

She's introduced beating the shit out of someone that shouldn't even be in the ring with her, tossing her around by the hair like that's something female boxers/wrestlers do (I'm familiar with neither but that still seems like it wouldn't happen?). She's an unattractive, top-heavy shape that Rory is trying to artificially boost the non-existant attractiveness of her with the shitty sparkles and all she sees in Pringles McMoneybags is... well, his money.

Marry for money if you want, but she just led poor Pringles on and on even though she was obviously unhappy. We're given no indication that Pringles was bad to her - all he shows her is love and affection, giving her things and from what I can tell, expecting little in return. If not for stuffing tons of her husband's cash into a bag and leaving with it, maybe I would've felt a little more sorry for Strawberry. In the end, I feel more sorry for Pringles - he comes off as the more sympathetic character in this shallow, one-sided, half-assed love story.

Other people have already spoken on the sub-par voice acting (and lack of subtitles) and SU rip-off style. Even the music was kind of meh in places, but that was probably the brightest thing about it.

tl;dr: Pringles McMoneybags did nothing wrong.

 

[IceGray]

Does that mean other Calarts classmates are bullying Rory or Rory just doesn’t want feedback because she’s an entitled piece of crap?

I presume the second from our point of view, but she might think critique on Strawberry is bullying.

Edit: If I was Rory I'd have made the final scene a heartfelt talk between Mr Pringles and Strawberry. Cliche? Probably makes more sense than what she put out now.