Time to smash some tehnology..... Hard!

So, as per my last post I got tothe halfwaystage and things were looking good. Unfortunately as I woke up the next day and settleddown to resume work and then flash pops up a lovely error message saying that all my work is basically unreadable. After some cursing and panicking I was saved by my chum Brian, whom will receive a nice big wet kiss when I next see him, pointed out I could take one of my renders and break it back down into frames with Media Encoder, so while I lost my symbols etc. I was still able to get back on track. Unfortunately the only render I had still contained some of the weird poorly rendered stuff that my computer does. I had hoped to get this out by the end of the project, alas I ran out of time.

Anywho, here are some of the stage by stage videos.







Fortunately I was able to retrieve the fire symbol from another file, and I retrieved the Caddy by putting the print-screen i uploaded onto this blog into photoshop.

So here is the finished article unfortunately due to rendering issues i was unable to subimit it for the competition, but I intend to enter the december contest as well.


for some reason i couldnt get the sound to render in anything but an swf format which youtube doesn't seem to like.

Overall I am happy with the results. I would obviously have liked to fix the poorly rendered shots at the beginning but I ran out of time. There are some parts that still look a little soupy, in particular the shot that acompanies the line "why would I put it there". I did tinker with removing some of the in-between shots but I couldn't get it to look right so I left it as is. I would like to try using animate pro instead of flash having seen some of the other animations produced for this project. I am quite happy with my lip syncing on the taller character, it was particularly interesting to see how many different sounds I could produce with three or four different mouth designs.
As for things I would do differently, aside from giving myself at least an extra week to produce my animations I think it would be to produce a dope sheet. I did consider making one initially, but decided it was pointless as i was going to be working within Flash, and would have the soundwaves visible. However when my file died, and I was trying to reconstruct my film within After Effects I realised just how useful it would have been to have the entire thing mapped out on paper. I think the biggest lesson from all of this, which seems to have popped up within all the excercises this term, is that technology is oh so very useless. At least mine is, and I think in future I will have to work in the studio more than working from home. At least until I can upgrade my home system. Otherwise I am happy with the project overall, I think that my crude style managed to compensate for the lack of technical skill involved in my character design. I think for the next project i would like to take my characters and make them even more abstracted from the human form. Though I'm not sure how successful (within the context of competition) this would be as the 11 second club winners tend to either use maya or the 'classic' disney style, but as Lao Tsu once said, competition ruins the creativity of the soul. So instead I'm going to try and go in a more artistic direction with my future films.