Return to the real world

Hey everyone, been a while since I’ve posted anything here. As a few of you know (the ones I mail with) I won a trip, and I’ve now been travveling for several months. It’s been great getting to see stuff that we don’t have in America. (Like lions! but more about that later..) A few of my webfriends whom I mail with regularly has commented that I’ve completely forgotten to blog or tweet or hang out online while travveling, but it’s really hard to focus on whats going on here when you’re out and about!

My daughter commented on my return as I landed in NY before coming back here: “Let me see the pictures!”. And it hit me.. I actually didn’t care to take more than one film of disposable camera, as I’ve had so much fun. She was really dissapointed, as she runs around with this tiny fancy camera with what seems like unlimited amounts of storage, and then transfers these images to her laptop and then to external hard drives. Mymy, her life is already ten times as documented as mine. Anyways, I’ll see if I can borrow a scanner later, and scan some of the good pictures, perhaps my little toon would like to hang around and do some stuff in africa?

On the bus back home from the airport I thought about how I can make the lions a bit more alive than a still photo. And somehow Southpark came into my head. Would anyone think it wrong of me to kinda copy their animation style for a short animation, just to play around with some of my images? OR Are there better ways to make simple animations for someone who’s learning, but really haven’t touched the product since before summer?

Anyway, right before entering this “hey, I’m not dead, I’ve just been ignorant, and I’m sorry for forgetting all about you guys, because I’ve been on this amazing trip that I won” post, I did a search for africa flash, and guess what I found something hideously fantastic. It’s so good it’s lame, or the other way around. Absolutely brilliant. I probably would have shrugged and said, “Definately lame” if I hadn’t visited Tanzania and had my experiences there. Now i know..   Theres actually some truth to it!

Anyways, I’ll try updating more regularly now that I’m home.
Fredric

 

Starting a flash animation, part two!

Allrighty then. I’ve been secretly doing some experimentation on moving the character around. I sorta wanted him to bounce. I am trying to learn how to import some external AS3 Tweening Engine, but the tests I’ve done with the engines I’ve found doesn’t give the “natural” look, that you get from frame by frame animation. Anyone reccomend a good tweening engine for “hand-crafting” tweens?

Anyways, so he hasn’t learned to bounce yet.. Perhaps there’s a storyline in there. When the little guy learned to bounce? I’m sure that could be an interesting short animation, but he’d need some friends to do something like that. For now he’s just exploring (like me!) and is generally afraid of the audience watching him wherever he goes. (not quite like me!)

The Little Guy went to the beach.

A couple of days ago I took him to the beach, and tried to make him scurry along in the shadow of the bushes. Scurrying also seemed kinda unnatural, until I started adding a few dots of brighter color seemingly randomly on each frame while the “main” MovieClip of the guy was travveling. That made the whole thing look a lot more organic.

Now, I only made a small test of the walk, and didn’t really animate all the features of him the way I want them to be, as animation takes quite a bit of time to do right. It’s better then to do tests and then decide what outcome will look the best before fully animating him, (eyes, expressions and all) in Adobe Flash. The picture above is a lot more detailed than the scurrying movie but I’ll still upload the short film to my youtube profile a little later today.

Naming the guy:
I’ve had a few suggestions for a name for the guy, the best ones so far is “Gooblet” and “Blobert“. I’m not gonna make my final decision until I’m ready to launch a well-animated version of one of the tests I’ve done (or some similar short storyline). So please, keep the name suggestions coming.

 

Starting my first “serious” flash animation

Allright, I’m now confident enough that I can make a short animation with my new character. He doesn’t have a name yet, and he’s sort of an orange blob that lives on the forest floor.

A little guy without a name yet.

I’ve also this image to flickr: Fancy Flash on Flickr I’ll probably upload more photos to that photostream later, so check that place for more content in the coming days/weeks.

At the moment I’m doing fairly simple frame-by-frame animation, but I do a little coding on top of that to make it look better.
Please help me give the guy a name.

 

Fancy Flash Games

I love my twitter followers, you can always rely on starting every day reading some nice comments, someones read my blog, someone wants to help out with my learning experience and people telling me what cool stuff they’ve seen lately on the internet. I’ve gotten quite a few tips on flash games that are supposed to be absolutely stunning. Now I don’t really know that much about video games. I remember the old arcade machines in the town ages ago. But I never really took much interest in them. How WRONG of me!

Fancy Pants Adventure World 2

One guy told me about a game that even has the word Fancy in it, just like my blog! Fancy Pants Adventure Two Can you believe it? I’m truly amazed as to how this simply drawn character moves, slides and bounces all over the screen. I’m guessing that learning to do something like this in flash will take time. I’m sure capturing the keypresses isn’t that hard. but making the character do all those fancy things while moving about takes a genuine talent for animation and timing.

Norwegian Catapult Game

Then one of my Norwegian followers (yes, the world has surely become a small place) told me about a Norwegian Catapult Game where you catapult over Norway, Now it took me forever to actually get the little guy to fly, as I couldn’t find instructions in English. But apparently the trick is to hold space twice, and press up for a speedboost whenever you find a cloud.  What amazes me with this game is the detail they put into air velocity and how the character moves. The animation is so-so (at least compared to the game above), but the code behind is brilliant, you can see on the left of the screen how far up you are, how fast you are going, and if you’re not focused on having the character facing ahead, he’ll lose momentum and fall like a brick. However the music for this game is so annoying, do not click the “Musikk” button if you decide to try it.

Politically Uncorrect Flash Game

And finally a game that more fits my way of playing. This game is more of a “wait for the right moment” and then take action. Kinda like hunting in the woods. You got swineflu, and have decided to infect everyone else. You have to wait for the right moment when you have as many civilans around you, and then you can sneeze on them. Only once per level. They will then in turn sneeze 3 seconds later or so, from where they are standing then. And it’s really fun when you see how fast it spreads. This game really is all about make the yellow, red and blue moving dots into green dots with a chain reaction. But when it’s linked to something thats on the new all the time, it makes it really fun. Which tells me that when I’m about to make new flash stuff, I should make stuff thats on the news, or hot or trendy. People will notice.

Thats it from me for this time. Please send in more comments on the blog and tips on twitter as to what I can write about. I really love reading everything you guys say. It really helps me grow my understanding of the wonders of flash.

 

Flash Takeover Sites – A Web 2.0 Trend

Recently theres been a huge trend in video players with complete site takeovers, most often in an unexpected way. Nintendo was one of the first that I saw, with their ExperienceWii Youtube user. The Flash is positioned on the top of the page, pushing the actual content down. it’s placed on a user profile instead of a video, so it will have a clean url. Pretty SEO friendly. Even tho the flash mimics a youtube video page, and not a user page, people don’t really notice until the flash starts shaking the page to pieces.  A neat reccomended viewing.

Not Really Youtube

Lately Honda (car manufacturer) put a commercial on Vimeo (flash video site) called Let it shine, the commercial itself is not too interesting. They placed a load of cars in the desert at night, and played with their headlights as a huge led screen. Not as impressive as the sheep LED art thing that also just came out. But however, as the video starts, the entire vimeo site goes dark (as the desert).. The Flash video somehow extends the player so theres more video than on the usual vimeo site. and as the day dawns in the video, the day dawns in the background of the flash takeover site, and the entire vimeo site is suddenly a desert. The whole thing gets pretty amazing when the sun rizes, with a lens flare walking across the screen.

Is this really the vimeo player?

Let me know if you guys have seen any other sites, where there’s a flash takeover, or ajax takeover or similar.

Love Fredric

 

Hello Blogosphere!

This is my first blogpost ever. I am a wannabe flash/flex developer, and this blog will be like a journey through all the fancy flash sites that I find, and want to learn how to make.

I really haven’t done much web development at all, but I watched a couple of free video tutorials now @ gotoAndLearn.com and so I think I’ll learn a lot from that page.  I haven’t gotten much feedback from the forum over there yet, seems the admins are kinda overworked. Anyone else use that site?

I’d really like for other users to leave comments on other sites as well that I should check out that have tutorials.

Love Fredric