The whole tilt-shift effect is nothing new, but this is the first time I’ve seen it used as a stop motion effect, or video in general. And remember, this is a real house you’re looking at below. Not a tiny model.

Here’s a couple links to how this was done. Storyboards , Pics

Russ Taylor showed me his very cool portfolio site today, RockvScissors.com (great domain name too). Once you’ve paid the toll, you can control an avatar to jump or move around and explore sections of his work. Speaking of which, Russ is specializing in all things Flash: animation, illustration, gaming and general web design (and I’m sure he’s very hire-able for anyone listening).  Good work!

I have an upcoming tutorial planned that REALLY requires some excellent fantasy-style artwork, think Dungeons and Dragon’s or World of Warcraft. I’ll post some reference below, but I’m looking for…

1. Realistic, so not cartoonish, or manga-y
2. Already in color, no pencil sketches
3. Doesn’t have copywritten characters (unless they are your own and you don’t mind lending them out)
4. Stuff you’ve already done. I’m not asking for new artwork, just stuff you have lying around.

The payment is: My eternal gratitude PLUS tons of exposure for your work since it’ll be seen A LOT onscreen during the tutorial. I’d be teaching how to add subtle atmospheric effects to a drawing. Much like the frontpage scrolling pics on Blizzard’s site

Please email jpgs or links to your portifolio to….  cartoonsmart at good ol’ mac.com

Some fan art I found on Blizzard's site. By Jeremy Sun

The Grand Prize Winner: Space Food Balls! (click to view)

Runner Up 1: A Reimagining of the Classic Flinstones Winston Commercial (click to view)

Runner Up 2: Maypo! (click to view)

What a day. I made one person very happy, and disappointed 15 others.  Sigh. I wish everyone could have won the big prize   and I’m extremely thankful to everyone that participated. Speaking of which, please check out the Contest Group Page for some of the other amazing entries. At the very least, almost everyone is walking away with an excellent new piece in their portfolio.

And whether you participated in this contest or not, I’d love some feedback for future contests. I think we can keep doing these for a while, and would love some topic ideas or general thoughts on what’s worth your time in the sense of risk vs. reward.

Thanks again everyone!

Yep, the judges are deciding! Thanks to everyone participating in our first Toon Boom Animate Pro contest. I’ll make an official announcement by tonight (I hope) and will be doling out some non-first place winner prizes.

Meanwhile, here’s something fun for ya. A company that specializes in cool barcodes, Bar Code Revolution.com (by the way, I found this site through one of my favorite new art blogs, illusion 360).

You could make one of these right? Just get a barcode authoring program and play around a little. Well if you did so dare to be this creative, its worth seeing what the competition charges for such things. Bar Code Revolution charges a non-exclusive license of $1500 for an initial fee, then $200 each year you want to keep using that barcode on your product. Shocked or not?  No? Well if you want an exclusive usage, thats a humble $4000 up front and the annual fee goes up to $400. Cough, cough, ripoff cough, cough

Okay we got some great last weekend submissions to show off. Actually I see one video is still in line to be converted, which is fine, I’ll get in touch with Toon Boom today to start figuring out the grand prize winner. And I’ll kick in some 2nd and 3rd place prizes since we got so many fantastic entries. Speaking of which…

By Tomasz Ostaszewksi…

By Anthony Williamson…

By DessieBabe…

Oh and since this posting will live on forever for future societies or interstellar races to stumble upon, all these entries in the contest were done using Toon Boom Animate Pro: Personal Learning Edition (the free version) and while this contest is now closed, I’m sure we’ll have more to come!

My Actionscript 3 Menu Mega Course is finally complete!! I spent the last month or so putting together tons of example projects for just about every kind of fancy menu you might want to build. The course is divided into 5 parts, and is over 6 hours, but with plenty of separate projects (there’s 34 start and finish example .fla files), so you’ll have a comprehensive library of files to pull code from for years to come! Also this course is for both newbies and oldies to Flash. I learned quite a bit myself prepping it.

Also master template builder, Tibi, has returned to offer a discount package on his 3 incredible Flash Video Player Templates. Each one is totally XML populated, but as always the .fla’s are included.

More details and discounts are at the usual spot…
http://www.cartoonsmart.com/this_month.html

Also Toon Boom has reactivated their discount code to get Animate for only $399! I can’t publish the code for the entire world to see, but if you check the latest newsletter, or email me, or post a comment below, you’ll get that code.

Thanks all!

Check it out, this one by Evan Bonifaico is quite nice. Definitely some cool multiplane action happening mid-ninja-leap…

Alright, I think we have a real contest on our hands. After this weekend lets call it quits for new entries, so we can start to figure out how wins the big prize!

Its pretty rare one of the uber-nerd websites I go to (way too often every day) has some actual art posted as  geek news, but AintItCooNews had these posters linked up. Which might prove someone running that site has some design sense, and could possibly one day change AICN to look like something other than the worst. designed. site. ever.

This is getting to be a lot of fun! Check out the latest two entires in our Toon Boom Animate Pro contest. The second one is CRAZY…