Hi all, I just wanted to let you know that I plan on creating a new section of my website devoted to sharing animation and illustration tips. In the past I've had many requests for all of the efx reference I've collected over the years from various studios. I plan on putting a whole bunch of these on the site as well as some efx tutorials.
I was thinking of a section about drawing and coloring and in flashand other Animation tips for flash.
what else would you guys be interested in seeing on the site?
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Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
What do you think about this idea for the 10 second voice clip to animate to: instead of using sound clips from movies, we custom make 10 second audio clips. So we can come up with completely original sound bites that no one has heard before. That way the animator is not influenced by anything they've seen before.
One thing I don't always like about the sound clips on 10 second club is that they can be pretty dull where the voices are spoken plainly and without any great voice inflections to animate to. If we make our own voice clips, then we can always ensure some wacky fun, flamboyant audio clip that can give you lots of fuel to animate to!
what do you guys think?
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
Thas a good point about not being influenced, but sometimes thats part of the fun for me (personally) Id be cool with custom sound clips though as well.Ive done a "few" voices for some volunteer projects and I have a little setup here at home (which Im sure many people do as well) But how to keep the clip appealing to everyone is the one thing I would worry about (same problem I guess with a sound clip of a movie you couldnt stand!!) and who would decide the subject matter?
Whats high-larious to me is barely a blip to my wife funnywise...and Shes not an animator for the record..
tough one..:confused:
Hmmmm, yeah I see your point, you can't please everyone! Well, maybe it might be fun to try it every other time or so. Plus it's better for your portfolio if you wanted to use the animation and the audio clip is not entangled with copyright issues.
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
In regards to the bandwidth thing, howzabout the submitters providing a simple link to their animations (which are actually posted on their own website) ?
Splatman :D
SPLAT digital
That was my suggestion for AnimationMentor when they tried rationalizing part of the high price with bandwidth. It would work better for them when clip viewing is limited. But most people don't have their own convenient space, let alone space with a nice bandwidth package, to be able to withstand whole movie files, especially if the site gets popular. It's better to have them hosted, especially for maintenance, site changes, technical support, etc.
The happy medium might be accepting submissions but people can request external linking if they choose.
If you'd want to take on the nightmare of hosting everyones submissions, at least limit the canvas and k-sizes. Keep 'em small.
10 seconds in Flash, right? A single .swf wouldn't be a high-bandwidth issue.
Splatman :D
SPLAT digital
If someone doesn't want to vectorize their drawings, and just scans it in (which I hope they do...I hope that there will be some doing just straight 2D) those would be picture files turned into movies and would obviously then be more significantly sized. So if it were 10 seconds you could find a reasonable limit, but the limit would be based on the drawing scans version rather than the tiny Flash version.
320x240 is probably the bare minimum, but for sheer resources and size, I would not go past 640x480. It becomes an issue of economy. Not to small to appear grainy, and disturbed and unappealing, but when does it become -too- big, as in it's large enough to competenly declare all the details you need to view. Even on my 1024x768 screen 320x240's decent, so a middle ground is my thought. And most of the Internet still browses with 800x600, so that's a consideration too. It should be fine for them, especially in the larger sizes.
I think the best solution would be to do all the hosting on the site. There will be lots of animators who don't have the capacity to host their own stuff. Plus I want the focus to be on 2D and not just flash. So those who prefer to work on paper without any aid of programs, can show their stuff too.
Splats, you bring up a good point about flash files being smaller in size, but novices who have no idea how to optimize their work, output files that can easily be over 1 meg.
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
I can set it up so that movie files directly upload, and if everything goes right with the program I'm trying to set up thumbnails could be grabbed from the movie, created and displayed next to entries. They'd have to be MPEG format. Anyone who has video software could do it, but unless they're using XP (Movie Maker comes standard), Flash users who used the program to synch their numbered drawings would have to convert AVIs over. Do you think we should rely on that technicality, or do more like the 10 second club and ask them to download screen grab software to take their own pics?
probably best to have the animators supply the thumbnails, since a lot of the files submitted will be flash.
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
Sounds good. When you have time, see if you can draw up a flowchart of how you want this thing to work, as far as people entering the site, what happens when they wanna view/submit/browse user profiles, etc. If we sketch out the whole plan I can get started on the actual coding and we can run tests on it to see how it works.
thanks for offering to help, I appreciate it. I'm not sure how soon I can get this thing up and running, as my main focus it revamping the rest of the site.
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
Yah, whenever you get time. I'm here whenever you wanna get started. I can even wing it and have something over at SoA until the time comes, and then just port it when you're ready.
This is good news, ill be stopping by to check it out for sure.
The only addition I could think of right off the bat would be somethin akin to the 10second club, but character animating for Flash (or hand drawn but predominantly 2d stuff being the emphasis)
Glad to hear about the effects and reference material, I still have about three or four of the ones you posted awhile back that I look at now and again.
Thanks Hickey,
swankaman
that's a brilliant idea! I've often wanted to animate something in flash for the 10 second club in the past, but realized that I would have been in the minority working in a non-3D style. I know that you can submit forms other than 3D, but it really caters to 3D. It would be fun to have a similar venue strictly for flash or hand drawn animation!
Any other ideas out there??? :)
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
If you wanted to take it a step further, I could help build the programming behind an automated system like the real 10second club (minus the news column bits and the commercial book sale thingies, etc...aka just the contest)... Uploading, voting, the whole bit...
Once Student of Animation is up I'll link to you too, so people can learn from all those personal experience notes, and I'll also encourage people to go there and actually make the animation based off of what they're learning in order to practice and get better....
wow, that would be very helpful! Thanks for offering!
It's a great idea, but will also require a lot of bandwidth too for allof the files that will be uploaded. I registed the domain: www.cartoonacadamey.com last night!
Flash Character Packs, Video Tutorials and more: www.CartoonSolutions.com
That's not a problem. Student of Animation has unmetered bandwidth. I could have the URL piggyback on my account. It would have nothing to do with me or my address, just use my account for its resources (I have arseloads of space too, so storage isn't an issue either). It would retain its own address and you'd still edit it and control it as you normally would. The only thing that changes is where it pulls the space and bandwidth from, and nobody's any the wise because it goes on behind the scenes.
I double-checked and the ratio of actual content to the section where people would be doing the downloading (in terms of traffic, not sections of site, because it wouldn't be on my site) would not remove me from the privelege.
I like it! Very useful! Has great potential too!
Good luck!
Adam
www.adamoliver.com