final

After turning in my final project, I decided that I am going to add sound for each movie clip. Also i thinking i can do something more interesting with the intro tetris part. Maybe a rapid countdown, or instead of it just fading out, have it zoom into one of the empty block of color, where it is all black so that it will lead you into the next clip with the black background and the flickering panels.

interactive + text

So I've finished my interactivity + text project. I have not added sound to it, mostly because I don't know what i'd want for it. Still considering it though.

to watch it - kylestrace.com/chaos

intro

So after making my movie clips with the color panels, i realized i needed a better intro. I went back to my story board idea with the falling tetris pieces and think it works pretty wel, however now my buttons dont work. I get a message saying

"TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference.

at chaos_fla::MainTimeline/buttonClicked()"

To see it go kylestrace.com/chaos

The whole quote is "Chaos is a close friend of mine" by Bob Dylan. I forgot to include that in my last post.

interactivity progress

So far I have been working on just getting my movie clips made. I tried to make the buttons work, but they didn't so im going to wait and do that in the end.I started off making the panels of color flicker side by side, but have now changed it so they also change in size and position within their section.

interactive media

So i've been having a hard time comming up with a quote that i've felt I can design an interactive media project with. after narrowing it down a Jimi Hendrix quote and Bob Dylan quote, I've settled on the Bob Dylan quote "Chaos is a close friend of mine." I want to show the idea of the multitude of things that occur in our everyday life and the pressures that were often put under. I sometimes procrastinate things if I'm not particularly interest in the subject... as most people probably do. But as we all know with procrastination thing usually pile up until the very end until we have so much going on that we have time to think or sleep. But when pressure is on I can stay focused. If I have free time my mind will wander and I won't get as much done. That's why it's important for me to set realistic goals with reasonable time. But a lot of times I've noticed that a lot of times I work better under pressure because of the feeling that whatever I'm working on MUST get done, and soon. It's almost like an adrenaline rush through all the chaos of the situation.

interactive + text

For our next project we are using a quote or words and making an interactive animation using them. I've chosen a quote from Bob Dylan "Chaos is a close friend of mine." My other and actually first choice was a quote by Jimi Hendrix "Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens" but i have been having a hard time thinking of how I can use that for an interactive animation.

AT&T... more deaths in more places. Final

Finally Finished

I think the only things i should cange are make it a little slower so you have more time to read the text, and also have it show no service when he looks down at the phone after loosing it.

problems with sounds

I've been putting sounds to my animation, and in my timeline there key frames line up right, however when I test the movie they sounds play about 50 frames early. you'll notice it when he is outside trying to get service and starts to talk on the phone. Also i can't get the music to play continuosly through each frame, it stops aftr the first even though there is still more than 2 minutes of sound left.

walking

I've figured out how to make my figure walk pretty smoothly. It wasn't that hard once I figured out how to use the bone tool right but took a little time to position him right in the sequence.

little progress

been working on my animation, but have ran into a few backfires that have been worked out. I'm now working on animating a walk cycle for the figure to move from in the house to outside.

AT&T animation

I've been working on my animation for my flash video.. showing how bad AT&T cellphone service is in kalamazoo. Ive been working on the intro mostly and trying to just animate scenes separately and than wanted to combine them all at the end to save from the confusion of 700000 layers and folders. I haven't been having the best of luck using the bone tool. specifically on editing armature animations once they have been made. but i have most of my intro done up to where he receives a phone call. I also don't have sound yet. But heres where i'm at so far.

maybe something like this... the arms and feet will be a lot easier to animate, but they remind me a lot of nintendo wii.

Character for flash animation

possible character for my flash animation. Concerns as of now are just when i go to make him move, how the arms and legs move. If i use the bone tool, it might bend them in weird ways so im going to draw a more simple character as a back up.

I've been working on my Personal Logo animation and also developed a sketch of a brief storyboard for it. I will post that after i scan it in. But here is the final logo animation I have developed.

kyle vs. Flash: Round 2

So we are now embarking on our flash projects. We are going to be making time based animations from what i'm understanding. My last try in flash was a learning experience. Many problems came up when going through different versions of it as well as using a tower and laptop simultaneously. not smart. Since then I feel a lot more comfortable in flash though so i'm pretty excited for this new project.

I'm having a hard time thinking of what i might want to show. So far, two thoughts are a safety animation based off of all the stupid ways ive hurt myself throughout my life. 2nd idea aims at my incredible awsome cellular service provider AT&T. For those of you not living in the Kalamazoo area and using AT&T, consider yourselves lucky. Those of you who are feel my pain. This seems to be the only city that it stops working without reason. one minute u have full service and the next you don't. I have to walk out onto my front lawn to make phone calls for the most part so its kind of pathetic/ histerical that it's that bad.

weird outlines on images and text

I've been getting a weird white outline on a lot of my image files that I made in illustrator. I found out that png files are working better than gif files in cs4. When saving for web, there's two options of png, the png 8 and 24. For some reason it's being inconsistent with which one is working better. Im working on saving new files for my text info so that I can get rid of anything that has that outline. Im having some problems with fitting things into my tables. I'm wondering if there's a way to add padding in an individual cell or if i just need to re-slice my image?

finally some progress

So i've been having a love/hate relationship with dreamweaver all weekend. One minute everything is working fine, the next nothing is right. I spent some time working with Leon on friday to put in a vertical-scroll image gallery. I don't know what it's actually called but we finally got it to work after over an hour and it worked perfectly and fit nice. Than I come home and of course it doesn't. I didn't do anything except open the file and i broke it. So that idea has now been abandoned and i have a series of rollover images in my left sidebar. I have gotten all of the thumbs formatted and put into dreamweaver so i just have to figure out how to link it to the image in the middle so when you click the thumb, the big image opens without changing pages.

Site Layouts

Some layouts I've been working with. About page and Home page shown.

http://www.layersmagazine.com/category/tutorials/dreamweaver

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/

I've been having a lot of trouble with dreamweaver and these sites have been somewhat helpful. I still can't get anything to work though...

other sketches of logo

Personal Logo Sketches

When sketching ideas for my personal logo, I kept coming back to two ideas. One being my close relationship with my family and family history, and the other being my love for traveling. I combined the two influences using the north star to reference the travel aspect, and the symbol of Florence, known as the Giglio. My Grandmother was born in Florence and lived there until she moved to America. I also had the opportunity to live there for part of the summer during my study abroad.

Funny flash animation I came across

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART