Sam's Blog

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.

[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/4123-1/ball.swf" height="250" width="420" /]

After posting the first animatic for The Makeover I got some feedback from a couple of animation forums and I went back to the storyboard and changed a few things.

The suggestions that I received were in regards to the pacing, things started pretty slow and then went too quick, so I changed the story a little to address this. There was also the issue with showing exactly what the character wanted at the beginning, I added a scene at the start to help establish that.

Another thing that was mentioned was having a balance between the beginning, middle and the end of the story. Right now I think the ending is a bit quick, almost a surprise, I thought about how I could make it longer to balance out the other two acts but what I came up with felt unnecessary and just dragging things on so I left it as it was before.

I am interested to hear what people think of this new animatic.
Click the image below to see it:

Please excuse the laughter sounds at the start, it doesn’t sound right but I haven’t found a better sound effect yet.

I have been working on my animatic for The Makeover and I was getting ready for posting the animatic here when I realized that I need a preloader so I spent yesterday making a preloader. It is not the smallest preloader (might need a preloader for the preloader!) but it will do:
[kml_flashembed movie="/gallery2/d/4093-1/cyclist_preloader3.swf" height="330" width="450" /]