Economics in motion

I thought instead of spending several weeks producing my cartoon than uploading it, I thought I might instead upload it as I make it. What I effectively mean is when I’ve done a few seconds of the animation, changed a few bits here and added a few bits there, I will export it, upload it and link it. So you can see the animation as it slowly progresses.  It also means  I can get a bit of input for parts that may have gone a slightly wrong, that might be a little more complicated to change in the later stages. Well anyways, here’s the link to the currently first twelve seconds of the animation (with the curtain motion partially done):-

EDIT: I decided instead of making a brand new post every time I added a bit to the animation, I would just describe the extra parts and add it to this post as an edit. The extended parts are the animation of the curtains and the audience:-

EDIT2: I extended Tomas’s animation by a further ten seconds and also added some colour to parts of it:

Further Extended Animatic

I think I’m starting to add brief parts of the actual animation into the animatic, hence the length in which its taking me to complete it. Oh well, it’ll just make it easier for the actual piece. You know the score.

Abstract Character Design

The idea behind this was to design an animation that portrayed various emotions through motion, colour and shapes. So I began by considering each emotion. Began with the simple ones such as happiness, anger, sad, excitement and confusion.

I considered drawing and writing about each of these emotions. You can see the originals in my previous mass sketchbook uploads here and here. However, here’s a cleaner version:

This is just to give a generalise,d but stylish idea of the sorts of materials that I considered for the animation. Unfortunately I didn’t really know how to approach this project mainly because, I apologies, I have never really liked abstract. So I decided to go heads in for this one to get the best ideas.

I applied a piece of music to allow me to portray instruments, or at least sounds, to emphasize the emotions. I decided to use Edvard Grieg’s  Piano Concerto, 1st Movement. I chose this out of my selection of classical because it had a varied amount of instruments, but also different pitches and levels of music. I’m not a master of music so sorry if that doesn’t make much sense .

Well here is the completed Abstract Animation.

Japanese Invention Day Google Doodle

Long title .

Here is the link to the completed (or at least for now) Google Doodle. There is no sound to it because I felt it a bit wrong to add sound to my own when none of the other animated Google Doodles had any sound to them.

JID GD

EDIT: I seem to have forgotten to add the one most important detail of the whole google doodle. The notification of what the whole google doodle is for. So I need to add this to the doodle and then I think that should be it. Silly me .

Designing an interactive flash

The project brief is this: To design an interactive animation that shows movement from one image to another from the five various (minimum) images. It should, to gain higher (respectable) marks, some form of button interface that utilises sound and visual imagery.

Okay, so this doesn’t sound too hard. I guess I could of made some proper progress on this project some time ago but I had originally considered this to be a project that I could whip out in five minutes flat (mainly becuase I have prior knowledge of Flash). Well apparantly this is not true and I actually have to work at completing this one, who would of figured.

So the first port of call is this… RESEARCH. Oh yes research, how fun this will be. What I will do for this is look up a few tutorials on how others have designed buttons and what is usually considered a graphically designed button interface. With the flashing of the button when you scroll over it and also the pressing of the button with the clicking of the mouse and such (I won’t silly talk from this point onwards, just felt it was necessary to pick up the post. Its been a bit blocks-of-text intensive).

Here are a few tutorials I’m going to be looking at (some I have already viewed in fact):

http://flash-creations.com/notes/actionscript_eventhandlers.php

http://www.devx.com/webdev/Article/11865

http://layersmagazine.com/flash-buttons-with-action-script-3.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUJkqzCM3L4

http://www.communitymx.com/blog/index.cfm?newsid=863

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvHsAsm_7yM