Holy Shit?

The animation was pretty much... professional quality, like you'd see in a real movie. Do you actually have Leslie Nielsen VAing for you? Because I seem to believe you do.

Kind of a rare sight on Newgrounds, really.

Good style, strange story.

I liked the style of animation, the strange character design, and the wonderful setting, it's very unique for a place like Newgrounds.

I didn't understand the logic behind the story though. It led up to strangeness, but it didn't make sense. Originally I thought he was going to wake up to some prehistoric world, but the world outside the lighthouse remained intact.

Oh man, this is why I favorited you.

I can't wait to hear the finished version of this.

You know shit gets real when you provide a score and conceptual notes, which is, in the end, what matters the most for a competition like this. Not only that, the music is extremely well composed. Things flow into one another and there's a large amount of material presenting a maximalism that is the hallmark of cinematic music.

That being said, I'm not going to kid myself or you by saying it's perfect.

For one thing, the mix holds the emotion back. A lot. The reverb is rather unrealistic, having too much presence in the higher frequencies and having too long of a decay. There also seems to be no equalization or mastering done on this. You could get away with that if your goal was towards the more theoretical classical fringes that exist (Cage, Stockhausen, anything that focuses on experimentation in music theory), but because this is an emotional piece you have to think in terms of the physical product. This is actually not that much of a daunting task - I find that an EQ on the master channel of your library with a very large increase in the upper 1/3 of the spectrum and a medium increase in the lower 1/6th does a lot for you if you're in a pinch (individual track EQing is always better, though). In the case of the highs, this accentuates the hits and spectral identity of each instrument, and in the case of the lows you're adding more oomph to the tails of the percussion.

And, unfortunately the worst of all, there's no identity here. It's generic. And I don't just mean that it sounds like everything else (although it kind of does) - It's well composed and fits the purpose, but nothing about this sounded like the Civil War. At all. There are times where you vaguely take a note from Copland (mallets at 2:23 - 2:35) and give it the American sound and perhaps you try to give it a folkloric edge with the solo violin, but those elements ultimately fall flat in their own separate ways. In the case of the violin, the melody just didn't sound like a Civil War folk tune - and I'm going to remind you that you ACTUALLY CAN STEAL FOLK MELODIES (I'm typing this in caps because there's no bold or italic and I want to stress it as much as possible). Not only that, but you're encouraged to do it. Copland did it. Stravinsky did it - in fact, all the famous Russian composers did it for the very reason I'm telling you to do it here - they wanted to create a sound which was wholly Russian, just like Copland wanted to create a sound that was wholly American. If you want to create a sound that is wholly the embodiment of the civil war, take my advice here and STEAL. It's too late now, of course, but do it in the future any time you're writing a historical tone poem such as this.

Also, don't try to be John Williams. John Williams does what John Williams does because he is, in fact, John Williams. And only John Williams truly knows how to be John Williams.

Despite writing a review that mainly focused on negative elements I am giving you a 4. Mainly because of the score and conceptual notes that show your thought process. I would have written more about what you did right, but you know what you did right.

This is pretty much the only good house song on the top 40 or whatever right now. It's near-perfectly mixed, the sound design is great, and there's a very good use of dynamics throughout.

There is a bit of spacial issues going on though, mainly due to slight phase-pan on the chords and the piano that comes in at 2:34. They should probably be panned to the extrema or centered (I'd wager centered). If you change that I think it would just sound much better.