joellongie.com

Self caricature.

Here is the character for my first little flash animation attempt. I’m going to keep it pretty smile focusing mainly on dialog and limited motion and under a minute. I cooked up a little ‘interesting’ story that I think will be eye opening and should make it a little more fun for me to animate instead of being just a boring animation test.

I’m hoping to have it done in the next week, but that will depend on my work schedule.

I finally made the plunge and bought Flash. I’m so excited to start doing to animations.  Not too much to say yet, but hopefully will have some stuff up soon.

I’m starting the new year off with a quick painting I’m calling “The Canadian”.

Well it’s been an interesting summer and now I’m back to hopefully start updating more often. I am working on a new web site. This time moving from wordpress to Drupal. I have been wanting to make the family section of the site easier to update with photos and videos. Hopefully I can post the new site in the next few weeks.

Here is a little illustration I like to call “You Smell Like Cabbage”.

Its my birthday! I normally wouldn’t mention it but I had a nice experience happen today. I went to work today feeling a little bummed out and tired. When I got there I checked my personal mail and noticed that the Xara monthly newsletter had arrived. I was going to trash it because I was in a hurry, but decided to scan it to make sure there were no new software updates.

As I was scanning it I noticed at the bottom of the page that they had featured the concept art I had done for the animation I’m working on called “Bert Speaks”. They hadn’t told me that they would feature that image and it really made my day to see that. Thanks Xara!

Here is the web version of that email. Look to the bottom of the post at the goofy dog sitting by a red bowl, thats him.

Xara April Newsletter, Xara April 07 Inspirational Art.

Last night I finished up a little animated Ecard for Easter. It was a fun project and for the most part turned out not too bad for a first attempt. I wish I would have had more time to work on it, but since Easter is tomorrow I had to finish it up.

My main goal with this project was to do a little bit more complicated of an animation. If you notice, it is really just the old “bouncing ball” exercise, one of the first steps most books teach in learning to animate. I would have like to get more squash and stretch into the bouncing baby bunny, but again time didn’t permit it.

Another goal was to try and get this into flash, with audio. That was a big challenge. I had to redraw the characters several times before they looked right in .SWF format. Also audio export is not well covered in the AS manual. Just as I was about ready to give up on the audio portion of the card I found a post on the AS forum that mentioned that you can import .WAV files into the program to animate with, but in order to export .SWF you need to have a copy of the file in the fold as a .MP3 at either 44100kHz, 22050kHz, or 11025kHz sample rates. For some reason AS won’t import .MP3’s but that is the only format that it will export. Now there is some pretty strange logic. I did the sound mixing in Premiere and exported the audio only into AS.

Another very important thing to get your .SWF files looping correctly in the browser is that you need to have file/project setting/extra swf frames clicked on. I was having a devil of a time getting that to work. Of course you really do need Flash to do more editing but for now that is not an option for me. I would have like to add a “play” button, and also an option to turn off the soundtrack. Hopefully soon.

Click the graphic above to see the final animation, or click here. The file is not optimized so if you are not on a high speed connection I’m not sure how/if it will play.

Before I start the next test animation I figured that since Easter is coming in a few days why not make an Easter Ecard for the family. Above you see me, my wife and my 11 month old son depicted as Easter Bunny’s. Its just going to be something really simple, my wife and I will be waving and I will have our son bouncing around the screen. I should be done with it tonight or tomorrow.

I was watching South Park last night and decided to try and make a little Cartman inspired Avatar as a first small animation test. I also wanted to set out and see if I could actually get .swf files to import into wordpress. They did, but it broke the validation of the site. I will have to figure out a work around.

(toon done in AS)