Kaulah is screening at the Melbourne International Animation Festival! I only found out last week (as a result of a bad email server) so it was a very nice surprise to find out that not only was my film was being screened but it had made it to the Australian Panorama!
I have been attending the festival for the past 4 days and it is hard not being inspired by such films at Madam Tutli Putli.
For the past 2 weeks I have been working as a Flash Designer/Developer at Transmission Games, never thought that Flash could be used in such ways. I can’t say much but it is very interesting how their system works and lots of energy at this company. Looking forward to see how the project goes.
I haven’t been posting much on the blog lately because there has been so much going on at school, it’s has been unbelievable, not really a moment to spare since I started the web portrait assignment.
I am the engine team leader for the collaborative project which has meant working from the start of the project so that we could tell the concept people what can and can not be done and then make prototypes of various elements in the game while the production team created all the assests and we have to carry on right through to the end. I am pretty impressed with my team they have been really great sacrificing their own time for the good the team.
In the midst of all this I had to find time to think about my minor project and the practice pitch which was today. Overall it went well but that could have been because everyone was so tried by the end of the session. The actual pitch will be on the 21st of May hopefully I will have to find some time in the middle of finishing the collaborative exercise to work on getting material together for the pitch.
Wow, talk about hectic! The last week has been a whirlwind but my web portrait is finally done. And it is good to see what everyone else has done too, but cann’t linger too long in this course it is start into a crash course in game design and the unreal games engine.
Here are are some character sketches I did for the weekly Animation Club theme, this week it was oil. No prizes for guessing where this is going… will post some animation in the next couple of days.
Ok I’m back, after what seems to me like a long detour into the land of flash advertising-game development. This was a freelance gig for glad which is using the characters from the movie Happy Feet to advertise one of it’s products. If you are interested here is a link to the game:
http://www.glad.com.au/happyfeetgame/index.html
There will probably be some little changes coming through from the client but I am hoping that is about it, it has been stressful and I am just itching to get started on the Samtiq (my home-made Cintiq).
Here is my seasonal greeting card for this year Seasons Greetings.
David and Kate from AIM contacted me to let me know that I have been accepted to RMIT’s Animation and Interactive Media Graduate Diploma course for 2007! I am so happy about that and looking forward to next year!
I was looking around for different animation packages and found Moho which is a very nice 2D animation program at a reasonable price. It is a vector based program designed for key-framing, it is not so good for animating frame by frame. As far as I know it is the only 2D Animation program which has bones, which is a way of inserting a skeleton into the drawing of a figure for example and then manipulating the skeleton to make the figure move. It is very much like a 3D animation program (you can even do some 3D camera moves and particle systems) but all done with 2D Vector shapes. I did the following animation as a test to see how things worked in Moho.
[gv data="gallery2/d/2279-1/cartoon_body2.mov" qt_proxy_image="anims/thumbnails/busstop_proxy.jpg"][/gv]
I found animating with Moho straight forward and the fast interface response makes it enjoyable to use and the feature for changing line-widths for the outlines is great. Only problem I had with it was that when I went to export to SWF it had this long black rectangle in the middle of the screen so I ended having to export as Quicktime instead.
