Sam's Blog

I am participating in the DanceOff Challenge on the animationforum, here is a test of a dancer I did:

What did I learn?

• Dance animation is quite complicated (for a beginner), so I simplified the figure and animated the hips like a pendulum and then added the legs, torso,arms and head.
• In Flash it helps to use the pencil tool and be really rough (I tried the brush tool but it doesn’t keep up with my quick gestural lines, don’t know if this is to do with Flash or the speed of my machine). I did the poses for the extremes and then added inbetweens until the timing looked right. Once the rough layer moved well, I made that layer a Guide and created a new layer where I drew a clean line using the brush tool.

Here is a freelance flash project that I finished recently. It is for the Open Intelligence Agency and I was subcontracted by Mesa to create the blinking squid animation and also the movement of the tentacles.

Originally the client wanted a wind effect in the tentacles which you can see in this post, but at the end they decided to go with an up and down motion. The animation of the tentacles is done using actionscript with a spring and constraint simulation, the blinking is done by hand with the timing determined by actionscript.

Found a  bunch of  old UPA cartoons at this link: Bill Paolucci’s Gerald McBoing Boing Page I haven’t seen any of these before, it is quite interesting looking at the styles of these cartoons.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://rumi.studio2pi.com.au/gallery2/d/4145-1/increase.swf" height="250" width="420" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://rumi.studio2pi.com.au/gallery2/d/4142-1/order.swf" height="250" width="420" /]

[kml_flashembed movie="http://rumi.studio2pi.com.au/gallery2/d/4132-1/suitcase_001.swf" height="250" width="420" /]