Okay, first... it DOES feel like a slideshow, mainly because of all those transitions. I do agree, it makes the entire look of it really cheap, like I sighed pretty loudly at the first transition. But even if the transitions were not there I would still get a slide-show feel out of it because of your lack of movement. Everything looks pretty static so I don't know what the characters are supposed to be doing, I can GUESS at their actions but I am not certain and that can create confusion. The segment from 0:46 to 0:56 could be greatly improved if you created a panning effect to make the people seem like they're walking or the black character seem like it's walking through a crowd of people However the segment from 1:44 to 1:47 is REALLY good and I think the most successful out of this entire video.
Moving on to the main character of this video. I feel like there is SO MUCH wasted potential! He's supposed to be a shadow/smoke/slime monster, right? Why not go ALL out and play with that? He feels very static and boring through out and that's the last thing you want to do: make your main subject boring. The segment from 1:05 to 1:08 is what I would like to see more of through out the video, more smokey movement! When you create a character that is pretty much amorphous you can do ANYTHING and you didn't, you played it too safe. In the 1:22 to 1:26 segment you could have spent less time rendering the girls and more time adding frames of these smoke monsters wrapping around them, smoke is not difficult to animate since it doesn't have a defined shape, as long as you closely follow the frame before it's not going to look too weird if something is not in the correct place.
Colors are a bit... distracting, specially at the end. Like I get these monsters are based on colors for emotions but I think it would be better if you just added black silhouettes with that one colored eyed instead of these color blobs, since in your same animation this thing infects everyone and they become black with one colored eye, this way they can also look more uniform like an army serving this one way, which I think it was what you were going for. It just felt weird and out of place, it really took me out of it seeing this rainbow in this dark tone animatic.
I think I told you in the last post, but you NEED to story board these things better, much more as a beginner so you can have a precise idea of what it is you're doing and where you are going and don't get stuck repeating frames. Even if it's just writing a loose timeline, like, from 0:00 to 0:10 this is going to happen, from 0:10 to 0:12 I want this and then this transition, you know? It doesn't have to be super technical but have something of a guide to help you out.
I attached some animatics that use black smoke monsters and an actual scene from a movie with a smoke monster so you can see what I am talking about not having these static blocky black shapes in your future projects. They all have some sort of texture or movement that makes them interesting. Also! A good thing to do is go on YouTube and SLOW DOWN videos so you can see animations better, you don't see it frame by frame but it gives you a better understanding of how things are created.
And because you asked, here's my first ever animation/animatic... I never finished because my professor was terrible and she never gave us time to work on it during class and with all my other classes it was just... really hard getting everything I wanted to put in here finished so I padded it with video alluding to what I wanted to do. This is from a comic I'm writing about witches and I wanted there to be spells and fights and an overall spooky sense over it. Anyway, I have worked on some other stuff but I never uploaded it anywhere so I don't have links.
