Football Comedy

In the spirit of this weekend's Superbowl (Superbowl XLIII) and in the spirit of friendly competition, I thought I'd share this video. When I first watched it, I found myself giggling a lot, try watching this in a large group, the giggling gets worse. I know, I know, its not American football, its the European kind, you'll get your dose of the American football stuff all week long trust me. Here's to a great game this weekend.

If you are an animator or creative thinker, be sure to stick around for the commercials. If any good ones stick out, I'll highlight them here so we can learn from them. Hmm, that gave me an idea for my next post.

In the meantime, enjoy the clip above.

Randolf

"Pencil" : FREE Open Source Traditional 2D Animation Software

A colleague of mine came across "Pencil", an open source, traditional 2D animation software application that is free for you to download and use that was created by Pascal Naidon and Patrick Corrieri. I've played with it and I have to say its really nice.

Without reading the manual, I was able to draw and get something animated in a few minutes. As I tell all my students, with any new software that you are learning, after you learn the basics, create something fun for yourself so that you can remember what you've learned.

"Pencil" works well with the WACOM tablet, the drawing tools are simplified, filling shapes with color is easy, and as far as animating is concerned, its quite easy to set up keyframes and various layers for detail, and also has onion skinning. When I exported, I found that I could export the file into a quicktime movie of various sizes with ease, and it also exports files into swfs and image sequences. You are also able to import sound and movie files for reference. Not sure about compositing into other programs like After Effects or Combustion, if you try this, let us know how things go.

"Pencil" is definately worth exploring and will intoduce it to my Principles of Animaiton Class for use this quarter...after they learn how to use the lunchbox...mooo ha ha ha!

Hope this helps, good luck and have fun.

Randolf

Video Tutorial: How to Add "Embed" Video Code to an HMTL Image

Happy New Year Everyone....

I just created this as I know it will help most of you trying to place a video on to your HTML image...Lots of questions arise in class about how to insert the "embed" video code on to a static image in HTML. This tutorial shows you how to place an embed video code from sites like Youtube and Vimeo, and shows how to place the code on to an HTML image.

The tutorial covers how to slice an image in Photoshop, combine slices, generating an HTML page in Photoshop, and how to use an HTML editor like Dreamweaver, to insert the "embed" video code.

I hope it helps you out. You can check out the video tutorial by clicking the link below.

>> Adding Embed Video Code to an HTML image >>