Another Flash job, this time fulltime!

This is a choice job company to work for too, GoMedia, they create all those awesome vector packs and are definitely a growing company.  One of the owners tells me they need a Flash guy. Sounds like the position could be for anything Flash related too. Web design, gaming, who knows. You can ask. The position is a  salaried job, w/ full Health, Vision, and Dental and an IRA plan.

My guess is that they are looking for the right person and not in a huge rush, so they are willing to snoop on portfolios, tweets, blogs, for a while to find out who fits the bill. Get in touch with Jeff at gomedia.us to show off some stuff.

CartoonSmart’s First Component….

…is not even really our component, but it was built by a former student, Tibi from Romania! You might remember his portfolio that was linked up here the other day. Well he and I got to chatting about his components, and he’s offered to let CartoonSmart sell this one for cheaper than usual. Its $10, and usually goes for much more on component sites.  Its a full featured mp3 player, with a very cool color spectrum visualizer while music is playing.  Plus I’ve recorded a short video included with the flash files, to describe some things about uploading or customizing the player, as well as how to dynamically load it into your current projects.

Here’s that offer, if any of you are interested…

Forum Post: Flash programmer needed

Job Post: Who wants to program a Flash slot machine…. http://cartoonsmart.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=990

The Atlantic praises Spongebob!!

Here’s a great article from The Atlantic (magazine, not ocean) about SpongeBob SquarePants turning 10 , complete with something the print-version couldn’t include which is a podcast commentary the author recorded over a few minutes of an episode. If you read the article or listen to the commentary, its clear the author James Parker truly does appreciate the greatness of Spongebob, and didn’t just draw the short straw forcing him to write about a stupid yellow sponge. Here’s some great observations…

SpongeBob SquarePants knows its own power; deep inside the show there’s even a SpongeBob-size critique of marketing going on. Bikini Bottom is periodically swept by fads and crazes, its denizens rushing around in a volatile teenybopper horde, cheering or booing or raving on the beach to shudders of Dick Dale-ish guitar. This is the Beach Blanket Bingo thread in the show’s aesthetic, its harking-back to the first deliria of the youth market. SpongeBob and Patrick themselves are feverishly suggestible—no gimmick or promotion targeted at them can possibly miss.

What introduced me to the show was when my son was two months old he got a touch of pneumonia, so we camped out at the hospital for a few days, and being the children’s wing, of course they had NickToons where Spongebob airs about 21 hours out of the day. So we watched an episode on how to make  a Krappy Patty. My wife and I were almost in tears laughing, which we figured was partly due to the delirium of having your child in the hospital. But when we returned home, we set the DVR to start recording the show, which was a mistake since, again, SpongeBob airs almost every minute of the day. So instead I bought the first season off iTunes, and we’ve been working through them from there. We’re somewhere in the middle of 3 now, so I don’t know if the show stays this good forever, but it is unbelievably good so far. At least once an episode, I’ll think to myself, “if I were writing this, I’d get really weird and have them do this next…” And then they’ll do that exact thing, or something even weirder. And The Atlantic articles points this out too, its not a freak-out Ren & Stimpy weirdness, its something

So any animators who haven’t also discovered Spongebob, get to it. Someone told me 9 years ago I should have been watching it, and I thought this person had just gone crazy watching too many kid shows with his kids… I was wrong. Vincent, I was wrong. Here’s a few of my favs so far (to keep it simple for first-timers, these are all half-episode titles from Season 1)…

1. Ripped Pants
2. Musclebob BuffPants
3. SpongeBob 129
4. Hooky
5. Jellyfish Jam

And to prove how right I am, I’ll risk some copywrong infringement and upload a minute from Jellyfish Jam. Click the pic to watch. Enjoy…

Click to watch Spongebob bust a move in this video!

Animate Pro test with “true 3D”…

Click to Play: Toon Boom Animate Pro Test: (with shameless self promotion )

Alrighty, this animation is my first real testing session with Animate Pro. I installed it a couple weeks ago and as quick as possible turned some jpgs on their sides, rotated on the x, y, & z just to see the promised “true” 3D that Pro boasted…. Well today I managed to find a few hours to myself to really do the program justice, and I’m very pleased how my first test project came out. 

Animate doesn’t have 3D Primitive shapes but faking one like the box in the animation above turned out to be very easy. I already had the art done for these boxes, so I just exported out a few JPGS, imported them into Animate Pro, and had the box assembled in less than 2 minutes. Even though I didn’t really need to do this I parented all symbols for each JPG, into a Peg Layer, and later into a Group for the Network (more on that later) 

The camera move was next. Basically the same setup as in the non-Pro version, except this time with 3D enabled so in the animation above its the camera thats turning (vs. the box art moving around). Only thing I cheated was the shadow, you’ll notice it starts and ends on both sides that the camera is facing. So it skews slightly from start to finish. 

Okay now the REALLY cool part about Pro that I discovered today ( but I know there’s more to be found) was the Network and Module Library. Together these two new windows really make me feel like the software is living up to the name “Pro” First timers to the program might find the Network window a little crazy, but once you get used to it, it is very simple. Or lets put it this way, if you have trouble connecting your DVD player to your TV, you might be confused by the Network. And thats probably a good way of describing this window. It connects together Effects, Cameras, Objects on stage, basically any kind of element you use in the animation and gives you a graphical network (hence the window name) to identify each thing and plug them together by dragging a line from one object to the next . So for example a Glow Effect would be connected to a symbol of a light bulb. PLug them together, the bulb glows. OR say you got your Glow Effect perfect but want to use it for a different object, then just drag a line from the Effect to that other object. Very quick and easy.

Click to embiggen: Network and Module Library are new additions

And yes, a free tutorial on everything I learned today, is in the works.

Oh and if you’re curious, there is a Gaming Package now. =)

Holy Cross Section Illustration!

Oh I’m so glad The Atlantic posted a proper picture of this online, so I didn’t have to try and scan the magazine to post it here. I love cross section illustrations and this is one of the cooler ones I’ve seen in a while because its of a damn cool, big ass boat!  Here’s the full article, read it carefully as your mind might explode all over your face pondering how fun this cruise ship is. Or spare yourself that danger, and just click to embiggen this pic of the boat…

Click the image above to view this map GRAPHICS BY BRYAN CHRISTIE

Summer poll!

And by “work” I mean, creative projects. Not just whatever you do 9 to 5 usually.

A 3D Program Made with Actionscript & Papervision!

Eee-youch, my ego hurts after seeing this amazing feat of programming. Gary Stasiuk has created a 3D program and its all within a .swf! Here’s his site’s official description…

VizualPV3D is a Flash Visualization Application that provides a GUI interface to create and manipulate objects in 3D scenes using Papervision3D….

This version of VizualPV3D is a public release alpha with many of the planned features complete or at a stage where they can be used and/or tested by Flash users. Several new and extended features are in the queue for addition to the application in the next few months.

And this fun little experiment is free to download (linked up at the page above). After downloading just open the file VizualPV3D.swf in Flash Player. After loading it’ll feel like a real 3D app. You might not use it for much, or anything, but its worth downloading the 9MB folder just to check it out.

Children.org’s “Lift One” Project

The good people at Children.org have started what they call the “Lift One” project. Basically they are encouraging current sponsors like myself to start their own mini-campaigns to get more sponsors. If you’d like to check out my page, click here and there’s a perma-link on the left column on this blog. You can read some of why I’m a sponsor, and of course there’s plenty of links to sponsor a child of your own. Like I wrote on that page, I’d love to see 100 or more kids get sponsored but if just one person that reads this blog sponsors a child that would rock too. Its $22 a month. I don’t want to say “only $22″ because thats either a lot of money to ya, or its not. But in terms of what these children get for that much money, it would blow your mind how far our dollars can stretch to make their lives better. I hear back from the parents of my kids (and sometimes the kids) in regular letters and its obviously humbling.

And please email me if you do decide to sponsor a child. I’d love to know.

Eep! The Animate Pro pre-order is close to expired…

Oops. I probably should have mentioned this sooner, Toon Boom is offering $1100 off the price of Animate Pro but for only another 24-48 hours. This is an awesome program. I’ve had a chance to use it already and tinkered with some of the 3D camera and object aspects, and was very impressed. So much so actually, that I had a kind of upper-downer moment where I sat around thinking I’ve been out of college for close to 10 years now and haven’t done any serious short animation. Should I have won an Oscar by now. Probably not. Should I have done ANYTHING by now. Probably definitely. That was the downer. The upper was that now that I’ve got some kick-ass animation software, its actually kicked me in the ass and I’ve already started story boarding something I want to produce in Animate Pro.

So think on it!