I have no idea what this is for, its a bumper for something, but hey, it looks awesome (and its got a moustache on a robot)…
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All posts for the month October, 2009
HOLY Space-Food-Ballin’, Cracker-jackin’, Baby Laughin’, Coke-drinkin’ Animate-made ANIMATION!! Today we got more Toon Boom Animate contest entries to show off. Also good news for anyone deciding to finish this contest or finish their Halloween costume, you’ve got till November 9th to wrap things up.
This one below is actually our first entry…
So I’m currently reading the Dark Tower series by Stephen King, and about 120 pages into the second book I realized I had no idea what the cover to the books looked like. No idea, meaning, my memory sucks. But I do tend to remember good art and these were just plain bad. Each cover looks like the publisher just slapped together some royalty-free photographs, added some blurs and tints, and wall-la, done. Which is a shame because these covers came from a recently-made combo pack of the first 4 in the Dark Tower series, so there was already plenty of fan art out there. Google “Dark Tower art” and there’s tons of better covers.
Anyway, this all reminded me of an artist named Aly Fell I discovered a few days ago from Drawn.ca‘s blog. They posted some of his sexy horror women pics, but I thought his portfolio had some even stronger pieces based on old pulp novels. So more baffling, here’s a guy making awesome covers for his own pleasure as a hobby, and Stephen King’s publisher can’t find a few hundred books to buy better art. Click below, or here to see how a real artist draws a cover.
Well, its about time for the entries to start rolling in. Remember the big prize is a copy of Animate Pro, a $1999 value. Full details on the contest are here, and obviously its not too late to enter (we might even extend the deadline a wee bit if I get enough emails saying “I’m almost done!”)
Take a look at one great piece done for it so far…
Excellent work done by Shawn Encarnacion!
This animation by Sergej Hein is awesome, but easily 20% more awesome for what he did in the last couple seconds.
Am I right or what?
The author of this amazing piece describes it as a “Handdrawn audioresponsive video exploration”, but if you read the comments section where he posted it to Vimeo, he’s a little more clear about the handdrawn-ness of it . When I first read the description and saw the animation, my jaw-dropped because I imagined this guy using all sorts of cutout shapes and rulers to create it. Well thats not exactly the case. But its still pretty cool because he used Actionscript 3, recorded where his mouse went in realtime, and it sounds like a different audio file would have produced a slightly different animation.
I did teach a tutorial on stuff like this a while back using both Actionscript 3 and 2. It involves Flash’s Drawing API (hey look, there’s that misleading word “draw” again)
So in the next few weeks I’m going to be checking out some of the applications that Influxis has on their Flash Media Servers, and beyond that, hopefully trying my hand at programming some Flash stuff with more real-time-connectivity that usual. Its not something I’ve done in a lesson yet, and if you don’t know what I mean by real-time Flash, check out some of Influxis’ pre-built applications here. They’ve got chat apps, TV stations apps, web cam apps, and even an entire 3D chat world (demos are here)
Also design-wise, I think they have a pretty sweet site. I have a hunch your Influxis server probably doesn’t look like the one below, but its fun to imagine a computer that could also drift race.
So anyone have some brilliant ideas of things to try once I get my bearings here?
There’s a sad comparison here. Watch Kenny Powers bully Stevie at minute 2:30 (bad language, so not safe for school or work). Now read how Adobe made Envanto change their name. Pretty raw deal. Bullies are only fun on TV.
So anyone else have “Flash” in their domain name? If so I’m assuming you are using it in the context of a camera’s flash or you’re referring to something that gives off light in sudden or intermittent bursts or just as a verb, as in, to flash someone. I know when I registered the domain FlashBooty.com in 1999 (a site which is now owned and managed by my friend Andy). I did not have Macromedia Flash in mind. For the record. Ahem.
Toon Boom’s “More for Less” tour continues next week (dates below), and for those of you near these cities here’s three major reasons to attend these FREE events…
- $399.99 Animate vouchers for attendees.
- Appetizers and drinks will be served.
- Attendance prize: one copy of Toon Boom Animate
Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 7:30-10:00 pm:
City: New York
Venue: M1-5 Bar
Address: 52 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
Wednesday, October 28, 2009, 6:30-9:00pm:
City: Washington D.C.
Venue: Hotel Palomar
Address: 2121 P Street NW, Washington DC 20037.
If you plan on going, RSVP here
Check out this animated video set to Coldplay’s “Strawberry Swing”. I’m pretty sure it is pure CG, not stop motion, but definitely made to look like claymation. I could be wrong, but as I’ve said before, real stop motion kinda irks me, and this doesn’t, so I’m assuming a computer was involved. All hail the machines. This was done by Ross Neil and Matt Clark from ThePixelHive.com
Stick with it because it gets nice and strange toward the end.
