This comes from Asterokid, a French animator (based in London). And as you maybe can tell from the screengrabs I picked, the plot of this short but sweet piece involves an army of FedEx-ers duking it out against team UPS to deliver a package. From space. Why? Who knows, maybe so a lowly animator can get the attention of two of the biggest companies on the planet. Hopefully it worked. I’d love to see either FedEx or UPS start using clips of this brawl in their commercials. Maybe they could do like a Marvel vs DC crossover thing…I won’t hold my breath for that though. Although my dad tell me he read somewhere that when a Lowes and Home Depot are built right next to each other, sales at both stores are better than those at isolated stores. Think that over. Hrmm…

And check out Asterokid.com , where you can see more from  Douglas er Asterokid, like this other awesome man-slammin’ animation, called Sigg Jones

Okay, finally got my stuff together to release these new lessons after a dry spell of non-newness. Also this month we’re selling two more templates from my old student Tibi. He sells both these templates for quite a bit more on other component/template sites, so he’s really doing us a solid by offering them at CartoonSmart so cheap. This one template in particular usually sells for $50, and its an amazing little piece of web design machinery. You get the .fla’s with his templates, but you could create an entire site from that download without ever opening Flash. Check out all the XML tags on the sales page and you’ll get an idea of what I mean.

About the lessons this month!… I taught the Time in Flash, and Visitor Counter tutorials and my special teams guy Manu (my doppleganger from France) stepped up and taught the Papervision3D lesson. And after watching the tutorial myself, I realized its much simpler than I thought it would be. I figured it would be tons of complicated math with polygons and whatnot, but its not. So don’t feel intimated. There’s some really fantastic things you can do with Papervision and this will be Manu’s first of many lessons on it.

What else? Anyone have any tutorial requests for next month?

Sure ya do. Click here to see Adrian Ludwig from Adobe show off Flash on the HTC Hero…

What’s questionable though is whether it supports just Actionscript 2 or both 2 and 3. Hrm…

This is easily the best and most detailed Flash panoramic movie I’ve seen yet. Do it justice and blow this up to as large as your monitor can stand! You can jump to at least 12 points (those circles in the images below) to spin around 360 degrees from each section. Also whoever programmed this did an excellent job, even including zoom in/out hotkeys (shift and the Apple key, probably Ctrl on the PC) or your mouse scroll wheel. Plus you can right click and jump to each section from there as well, which is a little easier to see everything in order.

Anyone down for a scavenger hunt. You have 3 minutes to find…

1. The slushie/ice cream machine
2. The sign to the Men’s room
3. Han Solo in carbonite
4. And at least three “please Do Not Touch”.
5. A playstation 1!

Sorry farmers, I just think its weird to drink anything from a cow. But someone might say the same for the half gallon of soy milk I chugged down in the past day. And I guess the California Milk Processor Board members who paid for this very cool 3D Flash site are realizing they need to do whatever they can to win over a younger generation that is feeling the same icky vibe about milk. And what else says “we’re cool” like a fancy Flash game. Here’s the site… GetTheGlass.com . Everything is very well done, but in particular I like the option to do a 3D spinaround to explore the island before playing. And I really liked how the dice bump off the entire stage in fullscreen mode.

The title says it all doesn’t it? Well almost. I’ve got a couple hard drives loaded with lessons ready to ship out to the next two bulk buyers. You can still download after the order, but you’ll also get a Western Digital 250Gb Passport Hard drive shipped with every tutorial on it.  If you’re interested, here’s the bulk sales page.

Also congrats to one of my Twitter followers who won $30 in store credit this morning for guessing which movie this line was from… “hit me in the bugle, got a dent in it”. And while you’d think that would be easy to guess with Google, I exact quoted it, semi-quoted it, and searched those keywords as much as possible before the contest, and nothing turned up the answer which was El Dorado . I think my hint that I was watching the movie at the moment led to the answer. How many movie on at 7am could have that line.

…Or Mike Judge. Better include him as Fox animation royalty since King of the Hill is somehow still in their Sunday animation block. Although I think this is the last season. As much as I like Mike Judge, I couldn’t get into that show. Anyway, now Fox wants to make you as rich as those guys. They want you, yes YOU, to submit an animation which might lead to a development deal.  Other prizes include, cash-money!  And the deadlines are pretty manageable (Aug 31), so you’ve got 2 months to put something together. And you’ll notice on their competition site that the example videos they are showing all look pretty Flash-made (i.e. just okay), so they probably aren’t expecting something that polished. And as much as I’d love to be supremely sarcastic about Fox, and them possibly screwing over finalists in the way that big mean companies usually treat the little wussy creative guys,  that might not be the case. I think I remember hearing that Matt Groening pitched The Simpsons to Fox with scribbles on a napkin. Of course its worth reading the fine print if you do submit your precious work. I’m sure if Fox’s lawyers could they’d make it so that just by thinking about submitting to this contest you forever give up all rights to any characters you’ve ever thought of. Oh wait, there’s that sarcasm I said I’d avoid. Anyway, here’s a link…

And whoa wait! CartoonSmart sells animation tutorials doesn’t it! This whole article is a pretty good segway to those now that I think about it.  =)

Thanks to Kris for pointing me in the direction of this insanely cool animation. You better just watch it. I can’t describe how great it is, and plus I can’t be bothered typing while I’m watching this a third time.

My favorite part was the log. Why didn’t someone show me this half a year ago though!

Here’s another update from Lili and Eddie on their latest animation using the appropriately titled Animate (by Toon Boom). Pretty slick looking!

Same scene: Before and after rendering

By the way, I’m prepping another (free) tutorial on Animate very soon! Here’s a link to the last lesson if you didn’t see it.

Below is a quality, short title sequence and like most openings I link to here on the site, its brought to you by ArtofTheTitle.com and it also looks like it could have been done entirely in Flash, AfterEffects, Animate, or any other relatively cheap piece of animate software. Hint, hint. If Joe Hollywood ever calls you up asking to do create a title sequence, say “sure, I can do that!”, because you probably do have the tools and know how!