I spent some time in the last 2 days colouring in and adding music to the animation that I did for Animation Club theme “oil”. The music is from Rammstein.

Here is a little test animation of The Sneak character that I did while testing out my new setup with the Samtiq (there are some problems but I might be able to find some work arounds, hopefully).

We have been busy at school doing walk cycles and all, I thought I would take a break from full animation and do some limited bull.

Today I started working on a new daily animation piece which required a scroller. One thing led to another and I started writing a scroller class in Actionscript 3.0 working with Flash Professional Public Alpha. I wanted a scroller which could attach itself to any graphic and create two instance on each side of the original and then scroll either to the left or the right. For best results the graphic will have to the same size as the stage and an empty MovieClip can be used to position the resulting scroller on the screen.

After a lot of fiddling around I found that using the EnterFrame event would result in jerky scrolling so I started using the new Timer class in AS 3.0 and that gave better results although the is still some jerkiness. You can see in the test below, use the arrow keys to change the parameters.

If anyone is interested in the source, drop me a line.

scroller_as3.zip

Here is the finished piece, there is heaps of stuff I can fix but I am well and truly out of time on this one, it was a great learning experience.

I have decided to called my animation for the Dance-Off Challenge Little Red Tiki Hood. Below is a work in progress preview, I still have to draw the dancer (not easy!) and also fine tuning some of the timing.

Ok here is the animatic for my entry to the Dance-Off Challenge:

What’s a dance without a little bit of monkey business?

Here is an update on the dancer, I added a turn to make the loop a little bit more interesting.

What did I learn?

• It makes it a lot easier to draw the stick figure if I think of which leg is supporting the body and exerting force while the figure is turning.

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.