I’m pretty happy with how this Animated Stills lesson finished up. If anyone remembers from like, er, 3 months ago I was talking about finding a nice matte painting to animate. Well here’s how it turned out (click the pic below to actually see it animated). Reid Southen contributed the original painting which you can see in all its unanimated glory here. Also I’m trying to get him to teach a Photoshop lesson for CartoonSmart, so if anyone wants to cajole him a little, please do. You can find him on DeviantArt or his more official looking site here,
And for those curious, this new animation lesson will be for CS4, CS3, and those die hard purists still using Flash 8.
Check out this crazy animation done for MTV Asia. It really has nothing to do with Jersey Shore, other than my assumption that MTV Asia probably has cooler stuff on it than MTV (Regular?). Although one of the skimpy anime chics does dress like Jwow…
Just got the latest newsletter from Toon Boom and thought this was worth sharing. I haven’t actually tried Storyboard Pro yet, but I’ve heard from a few people that really love it. Ironic timing, since right in front of my keyboard are thumbnail sketches on a piece of ripped out notebook paper that someone could mistake for a really badly drawn storyboard (which it is)…
So I try to crowbar most things I post into some category loosely related to art or animation or code or anything I might teach, but this just goes into the category of “cool”. Until I can justify a category dedicated to “city planning”. Take a looksie at what made me go “NEATO!” today…
So the second article I’m suggesting you read today, (Yes, more reading!) is over here at ActiveTuts.com regarding The Death of the .Fla !! That’s right Flash developers, our precious .fla format might not be around forever. And phew, I was about to put money down on LongBets.org that it would.
Pros and cons of this epic change:
Pro, if you read the article the implication is indeed awesome. It kinda sounds like the one-world government of file formats, but in the best sense possible. A lot of programs (like AE, Flash, Photoshop) can edit the same file, XFL (which is really a zip of other files). That truly is cool. And X’s are cool.
Con, I really liked the .fla extension. Some programs write to files with weird extensions leftover from what the software was named many iterations ago. But .fla standing for Flash obviously, was perfect. And with ALL the other Flash-branding Adobe is doing (i.e. Flash Catalyst, Flex Builder becoming Flash Builder) leaving around the extension .fla seems to have “synergy” (- Jack Donaghy )
So here’s my list of other file extensions more deserving of a change first…
Adobe Photoshop ( .psd ) : Sounds and looks like an STD or disease
Adobe Illustrator ( .ai ) : Too sci-fi. I feel like when I mention this in a tutorial, people only paying half-attention wake up and are like “what about that movie?”
Adobe After Effects (.aep ): Should have always been .afx . How cool is that. AFX, son.
Shockwave Flash Movie (.swf ): Worth changing just so developers can stop butting heads over whether to call these “S.W.F files” or “Swiffs”
Apple XCode ( .xcodeproj ) : WTF Apple? A 9 character file extension?! Really? I think for those of us smart enough to use XCode after just “dot xcode” in a filename we would have figured out this is probably an XCode project.
And here’s my list of already perfect filename extensions
Quicktime Movie ( .mov) : If there was ever a land-rush to primo abbreviations , Apple totally must have killed some other squatters to get this oceanview extension.
JPEG Image (.jpg) : Nuff said ( And I didn’t even say anything).
Plain Text Document (.txt) : This one I should post on LongBets.org , anyone wanna bet in a 1000 years plain text docs still have this extension? Also that plain text documents become self aware and kill all humans.
Adobe Flash Document (.fla ): Perfect because, oh wait, this is the one they are changing! I forgot.
Well how many people other than Vince McMahon’s accountant still remember the XFL? That Xtreme Football League, er, was it Xtra Fun League? I guess now XFL stands for Xtensible Flash L-Something. Oh I see. The L part is, yeah yeah. Got it.
I guessed it was a big pain in the arse, and this article at Slate.com confirmed this. And if you’re thinking, “oh more reading? I hate reading!” Well it’s relatively short, and easy to understand even if you’ve never laid in bed thinking about this before (“laid” or “lied”?).
It brings up an excellent point at the end, why would any filmmaker convert from 2D to 3D in post production instead of just duct-taping a second camera to the first. The post-method requires dozens of artists to go slightly crazy 30 times per second as they have to separate elements of the movie into layers, and occasionally fill in some of the separation gaps. The duct-tape method requires some guy named Jim to hit the Record button on two cameras at exactly the same time. Seems to me with ALL the money that goes into a big budget movie, having a second camera rolling right next to the first one, wouldn’t even be something you would do for 3D necessarily, its just a good Plan B.
Well, what do I know. I still check my 3D glasses for a red and blue tint.
The pic below is vector. Don’t believe me? Hit it to open it big and it should magnify even more when you click on it again. This comes from Egba94’s Deviant Art page. Oh man, I hope the ‘94 part doesn’t mean he/she was born that year… Oye, my art could be getting schooled by high schoolers.
The owner of BadBoyComics just emailed me to say hello, and his site is worth mentioning here. He’s even got a quick, non-talkie Photoshop demo on digital inking. If you click on it below and jump to YouTube to watch you should see a much higher resolution version….
…and REALLY hope this finally fixes a problem thats plagued some of us Adobe Flash on the Mac users. Its a whooping 140 MB update, so this isn’t just an update to Flash Player. Okay, Safari, I must shut you down to install this…. see you on the other side, brother.
Anddddd, success. I’ve been working on a project tonight that was constantly doing that, and its fine now. Okay. Saga over. By the way, I noticed this issue only affected 4 Core and 8 Core Mac Pro Desktops. I’d love to know what percentage of Flash users that is, because this has been a major annoyance since Flash 10 came out, which was a while ago now. Especially for certain video-based training instructors that like to publish often and not have to shut down their screen capture software to edit out all the times a blank publish window appeared.
