Dinamo Flash Brief

Okay, this is the result of the Dinamo Flash brief that I've been doing. Kind of.

When I tried exporting it as a .swf file, it kept putting one of the sound effects out of place; then I had trouble publishing it as a .avi, but when i finally did, it seems to have put some of the animation out of place (as it is here). I guess I need to try exporting it on my home computer. Anyway, have a look and see whatcha think.

This morning we had to pop over to Dinamo and present our aniamtion to the fellows in the studio, namely Aron and Ben. They seemed quite pleased with what we had produced, although Ben was somewhat confused becasue he had written the brief believing that everyone would be doing it, rather than the setup we had where 2 people worked on one of 3 briefs. We left the Flash files with them so they could have a look at our file and layer organisation and naming (oh bloody hell mine is gonna give them a headache) and they should be in touch soon.

A Digital Pimp of Some Sort

Cyfle now has all our videos - the Digital Storytelling ones anyway - on a single channel on You Tube. So if yez wanna see our work, that's the place to see it.

THEPAINOFANIMATION

I have started animating on the Dinamo brief. Or trying to. I always find it a bit difficult animating if I haven't done so for quite a while; with the added complication of graphics within graphics within graphics within graphics, my mind is starting to slowly unravel. The feeling may best be described as "cruntpiscule".

The Moose Style: Charcter Designs

Progress on the Dinamo Flash brief continues. Here's the character designs I've done, I've just finished some lip synch and now I have to continue making body shapes in the library before animating. So much do, so little time (one more week to be precise)...

Magic of The Moose

Ryan Neal at Dinamo told me to check out Chris Phillips, yet another GCADT graduate, upon whose style the Moose is apparently based. Anyway, it's all very good, so GO LOOK NOW.

Picture by Chris Phillips:

Dinamo: Week 1

Bit of a late update I'm afraid.

On Monday we got our Flash briefs for the next three weeks. The Bobinogs brief from Calon was assigned to Mike and Ben; Griffilms gave Kei and Gary a brief based on Mr. Stunt Butt; and Jen and I got an animation test brief from Dinamo.

Of the three, ours was the loosest; we were given a 19 second piece of dialogue, to shich we have to animate, and the only direction we have is that it is to be in the style of The Moose. So far I've done some charcter design (although after feedback from Ryan Neal I have to adjust them somewhat to fit in with the style), and I'm doing an animatic in Flash. Actually, I've started making my library too - for it must be kinda cut out animation - which I'm not scheduled to do until next week. So... back to work!

Busy Busy Busy

I haven't posted anything for a few days because I've been so involved with getting this Eisteddfod animation finished. In the end, a group of staff from Cyfle and S4C got together to decide which animation they were going to use. They chose mine.

This was quite surprising, considering it's rather cheap-looking and features a one-eyed alien (not the first thing you'd associate with Wales, but there you go). So over the weekend I've been tweaking the animation and grabbing some simple sound effects to use. Now I've given Mike the .fla files, and it's up to him to come up with a t-shirt image. Me, I'm just happy because over the weekend I found my DS, and we saw the Simpsons film yesterday; it was freakin' sweet.

Eisteddfod

Like I said, we're meant to be doing animation for these mobisodes: 3 segments of 10 second animation that link up sequentially. I don't really know what's going on regarding the finished animation; we're all kind of working separately on different things at the mo'. Here's one of my little bits of animation (the second one). It's pretty poor, because I went with using graphics and stuff (why not eh?) rather than drawing each frame and because it's on 12 frames a second, in order to be used for mobile phone downloads.

FLASH!

Er, okay. It's wednesday and the middle of the week, and on Monday we started this Flash project to create 'mobisodes' for the Eisteddfod and whatnot. I'm okay with Flash - that is, I know how to do drawn animation, and I know my way around the software quite a bit, and when putting the two together I can usually come up with something decent. I'm not so hot, though, at using shapes and tweens and graphics and other such things of that nature. That's where Marc Lewis comes in: another ex-GCADTer, he knows his Flash. He went through some basics of using graphics and mask and paths and things with us, which is great because now I'm starting to fill in some blanks with using the software. Yesterday we got to grips with some lip sync, but I've done lots of that already and I used some sound from my Digital Storytelling Project, so I don't think I'll bother putting that up anywhere. Anyhow, I shall continue with the Flash stuff now, we're meant to be putting these things together by the end of the week.
Finally, seeing as I like to accompany as many posts as I can with at least one picture or video, I've uploaded a bit of some test I've done; they're utterly pointless, this was just me getting to grips with using nested graphics and tweens.

In any case, here's the finished digital storytelling:

Digital Storytelling Stills

Here are a few stills from the project. The whole thing qas done on my laptop - which is at home - so I've grabbed a bunch of images. I will upload the finished video when I've got the audio levels adjusted properly.

Fight Through The Pain

I've just about done my digital storytelling project, though I had to stay up till 5am to work some stuff out (plus my computer sucks). I just thought I'd stick up a sample of some of the limited animation that I've included in the project.

Meez

Weird 3D avatars at Meez.com

Work in Progress 2

Starting to make progress with the digital storytelling; now editing sound and producing finished Flash images. Here a a few of them.

Work In Progress

Alrighty then, here's a few development sketches for my digital storytelling project, together with a sample of what the finished style should look like.

Hooray for Polls!

Last week Blogger added a polls feature to Blogger In Draft. And after almost seven days of eager anticipation, I was finally able to add my own poll! You can see it on the right hand side of this blog.


.....Hell's teeth, I'm such a geek.

The Sheer Unmitigated Horror

Oh hells. We've just had our audio recordings back from Gareth, and Oh My Shits. I know people generally don't like the way their own voice sounds when it's recorded, but mine is particularly bad. I should be used to this, because I've done plenty of voice overs and voice acting, but my normal voice, in playback, is horrific. Having said that, I look forward to haring everyone else's recordings, though I'm sure everyone else will be cringing too.

Showreel

It's just occurred to me that I haven't put up any animation on this blog. So here's my most recent showreel, which I used to apply for Cyfle.

Terminator 4: Rise of the Funk

Media & Stories

Time for a new post, methinks. Yesterday we popped over to Atticus Media, to have a look at another local company working in graphic and advertising. It was actually a very swich looking place, and apparently they did printing work upstairs (though we didn't see that). We also had a presentation by Richard Webb, from Moseley Webb. Apparently they specialise in making visually arresting presentations, and from what we saw they do a damn good job, too.
So, this week we began our two week digital storytelling; after coming up with ideas for a two minute story about a personal experience, we have to record a voice over and then set it to a sort of comic-book style video thing (it'll make sense when I've done it and uploaded it). To that end, Ian Staples came in, to do a creative writing workshop and help us thrash out some story outlines for our project. It was quite interesting; let's just say that I won't be able to look at Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater in quite the same way again...

There Is No Point To This

But it sure as hell is fun!