Line work in the front room of the Momentum Project space. This took us three long days, not including the fourth, when we came back to paint over Salvador Dali. The exhibition is opening this Friday at 6pm, Market Square, Hunter St mall.

Related posts:

1. Momentum Project, cleaning windows
2. Opening night and opening times

Still working on the title sequence for To Kill a Mockingbird. I’m trying to make it easy for myself, because of a severe lack of Flash skills, but I’m still getting stuck. I’m at 25 seconds or so.

Related posts:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, mood and atmosphere
2. To Animate a Mockingbird
3. EightySixKillers

The Human Factor, title sequence by Saul Bass. Incredible music.

Catch Me if You Can, title sequence by Kuntzel and Deygas

I’m starting to get the look & feel for my intro sequence for To Kill A Mockingbird. Still not quite sure about the typography, but I am probably going to go with a classic serif, possibly Baskerville.

This is a still frame from the first scene; calm, slow paced, falling leaves, and birds somehow interacting with the typography. The brief requires ten key production and cast members to be presented, and the length is supposed to be 60 seconds, so I will probably present two names at a time to avoid stressed transitions.

I’d also like the tree to grow from nothing at the very beginning, but so far, I don’t really know how. The only solution I have, is to simply mask it all out, and slowly reduce the mask until the whole tree is revealed. This won’t affect the stroke weights, though, and might look awkward.

Related posts:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, storyboard, process
2. To Animate a Mockingbird
3. Navigating the timeline ++

As you might be able to tell–I’m still at the very basics of Flash.

I’m doing a 60 second title sequence for a fictitious remake of To Kill a Mockingbird, and these spastic bird shaped things will hopefully be part of it.

The flapping of the wings is a simple two-frame movie clip in the library, which is transformed and animated in the main timeline.

Related posts:

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, mood and atmosphere
2. Navigating the timeline ++
3. To Kill a Mockingbird, storyboard, process

This project demonstrates timeline navigation, key stroke detection, a basic URLRequest, context menu modification, and how to make an object annoyingly trail the mouse cursor. The code follows after the jump.

Setting up the navigation

stop();
btn_start.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotostart);
btn_one.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoone);
btn_two.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gototwo);
btn_three.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotothree);


function gotostart(e:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndPlay("frame_start"); // frame labels, defined in the properties panel
}
function gotoone(e:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndPlay("frame_one");
}
function gototwo(e:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndPlay("frame_two");
}
function gotothree(e:MouseEvent):void {
gotoAndPlay("frame_three");
}

START: Detecting key strokes

stop();
stage.addEventListener(KeyboardEvent.KEY_DOWN, nudge);

function nudge(e:KeyboardEvent):void {
if (e.keyCode==Keyboard.RIGHT){
purpleball.x += 10;
}
if (e.keyCode==Keyboard.LEFT){
purpleball.x -= 10;
}
if (e.keyCode==Keyboard.UP){
purpleball.y -= 10;
}
if (e.keyCode==Keyboard.DOWN){
purpleball.y += 10;
}
}

ONE: Go to external URL


stop();
var portfoliourl:URLRequest = new URLRequest();
portfoliourl.url="http://www.asgeirhoem.no/portfolio";
btn_external.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, gotoexternalsite);

function gotoexternalsite(e:MouseEvent):void{
navigateToURL(portfoliourl);
}


TWO: Editing the context menu


stop();
var myMenu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu();
myMenu.hideBuiltInItems();
myObject.contextMenu = myMenu;


THREE: Mouse cursor


stop();
trail.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, followcursor);
function followcursor(e:Event):void {
trail.x = mouseX;
trail.y = mouseY;
}


Related posts:

1. Hours of fun with ‘Nudge the Black Circle’
2. Flash/Actionscript, the very very basics
3. I am an airplane

The EventListener listens for every time Flash enters a new frame, and executes the function fly, which manipulates the X values of three objects on the stage.

Related posts:

1. Hours of fun with ‘Nudge the Black Circle’
2. Navigating the timeline ++
3. To Animate a Mockingbird

The cola commercial (which I’ve mentioned recently) was due this morning, and my endless hours of rendering time were condensed to a 30 second display of glass textured concept-lacking madness. I had only used Cinema 4D once, for a still-frame bottle render, before this, hence the modest detail in the models. Anyway, I’m very happy with how it turned out.

(Holidays!-ish)

Related posts:

1. Cinema 4D: Lighting Experiments
2. Large Havoc Creator
3. LHC: New renders

Today, we’ve been experimenting with using the Stage object to animate and cut between multiple cameras, which will be handy when I start rendering. We also learnt how to loop a sequence, using the before and after attributes on specific tracks. Instead of duplicating and repeating a number of key frames, setting the after attribute to repeat will loop continuously from the first to the last keyframe in a track.

And, as if that wasn’t thrilling enough, we played with inverse kinematics to animate objects in relation to each other. I did this fantastic robot dancer, using the standard Figure object:

I also did a 720×405 render of the LHC, which is about twice the size of the previous ones. 200 frames took about two hours, probably because of my abuse of glass textures, combined with hectic moving lights and spastic cameras. (And, by the way, the music is ready to go—the random collection of sound effects and half-decent loops from Garageband actually turned into something not half bad.)

Related posts:

1. Large Havoc Creator
2. LHC: New renders
3. Zap! Cola, 3d commercial

This is the latest render of the thing that I last time dubbed the Large Havoc Creator; a fantasy coke manufacturing/explosion generating wunder machine. I’m still working on lighting and textures, but it’s about time to get moving and render some final scenes, so I can begin editing. I don’t really have any music yet, either, though I know roughly what I want.

I really like how the light reflects through the tunnel, but the rendering time is getting ridiculous. This time, I rendered with a Motion Blur on both the spheres, but when I slow the video down, it doesn’t really look like it has any effect on anything. I am starting to get the hang of the time line and key frames, though, which is satisfying. I can make balls bounce.

Camera on a spline

Related posts:

1. Balls
2. Zap! Cola, 3d commercial
3. Cinema 4D: Lighting Experiments