Feedback on my current Flash project (WIP)

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 11:07 pm

I am working on my first short as part of my Flash class. I hope that I'll produce something good enough to add to my portfolio and so I wanted to post WIP here for feedback as I progress.

I sketched about a dozen primitive style plants and scanned them in, live traced tweaked and colored and of course was told that I'd be better off with just one or two repeated symbols.

Here is a first poke at the island ...

The simple leaves in front were added later after I saw greykids Bunny Love. I wonder if I should eliminate everything except one simple tall plant and one short leaf as they did - theirs worked very well to set up the atmosphere -what do you think?

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Here I tackled the landmass some more. Found out my assumption that one small symbol tiled a 100+ times would be easier on the system was wrong when I drew a simple mud lump and repeated, but on the plus side I liked the effect and it worked as a quick way to lay out the land and then I just broke it up.

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I used a few different ideas to try to create some waves and here was my first effort that sort of works ...

http://www.stormvisions.com/bc/water1.mov

Only problem I see is that using a few copies of this the system slows down noticeably on playback. Not sure if I need to export individual frames later and use some sort of video editor to put it together?

The wife - my inhouse free critic- says the color is way too light. I'm not great with color yet -what do you say? I guess I can go with a more intense blue, I just wanted to show shadows of a few things swimming so I set the opacity down but guess I can find another way to hint at life beneath the surface.

Any comments and suggestions are all to my benefit, still struggling with everything from style to line weights to color etc so love to hear from you pros.

Oh, and last but not least I'll be adding a sound track -no dialogue but some music and a few choice 'YAAAA!" and 'BURP!' things with some ocean surf sounds and squishy mud sounds. In thinking about this I guess if I had the resources I'd do the sound track first and then match everything to it but do you think it possible once I've prepared all the art that you can work on the animation simulaneously with the sound? Figure there will be only the aforementioned burps, gurgles and yells to lip synch.

Sorry to subject you to my rambling thought process.

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 11:55 pm

Nice work bupaje! As for the color. The only thing I find to light is the water. But just go with what you feel is right.

heyvern · Post by **heyvern** » Fri Aug 11, 2006 11:57 pm

Hey it looks good!

I like the leaves in front (middle ground? the ones pointing straight up-ish)... I would suggest a bit more variation... more different angles.. sizes... right now they look a bit... regular.

Also watch the stroke weights... the rocks further back seem to have thicker lines than the ones closer to the camera.

I like the atmosphere of it.

For the water... to get smoother motion and keep the file size down (if you plan to stay with flash as your final output) I would make the water even more simple... you could animate... hard to explain.. ripple "shapes" and wave "shapes"... sometimes the "gradations" are over kill, when all you need is a suggestion of water.

These are just some rambling thoughts.

-vern

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sat Aug 12, 2006 8:11 pm

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'm tackling this right now.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:31 am

Hey guys. I'm working out the art a bit more. Still may redo the plants but next week we begin animatio so I'm starting on characters and have to break them up this week. This is what I have so far. The front and side views of Marcus (the fish) don't quite match. I am reconsidering since his head is basically a pear I can probably use it for both if I mask it -see how that goes.

Feedback appreciated.

p6r · Post by **p6r** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 9:07 am

I like all the things you did here : characters and background !
Congratulations !!!

ingie01 · Post by **ingie01** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 12:17 pm

Hi Burt,
Wow, great stuff! See what schooling does?
I just finished the 6 week course on basic Moho discussed in "on line tutorials"thread here and happy I did.
Your work has really improved....
Please post as often as you can with this thread.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 9:33 pm

Thanks for the kind words guys. I'm in the process of trying to cut up the characters for animation. Will post some tests this weekend I hope.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Sun Sep 17, 2006 3:38 pm

Well, my animation is due this Monday and I'm still about halfway through - this semester has been the most fun but the workload has been a killer.

Anyway this is what I have so far ....

http://www.stormvisions.com/2dcgi/PrimalSoup_091606.swf

Its rough but I'm running out of time so I'll just 'get it done' but rework it when the semester ends next week to try to get it good enough for my portfolio.

After the fight I need to add the sequence with the worm getting stretched like a rubberband out of his hole. If I had enough time I would have liked to add some water spray and volcanic smoke.

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 12:11 am

bupaje wrote:If I had enough time I would have liked to add some water spray and volcanic smoke.

Get yourself down to odd job jack, and click on the "Free Jack" link. You can download complete artwork from episodes, INCLUDING special effects sequences like water, smoke etc. You'll need to download Bit Torrent if you haven't got it, and the files are HUGE, but well worth the wait.

Hope this helps,

J

Bones3D · Post by **Bones3D** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 12:31 am

Try checking out Kaput & Zosky on the Nicktoons Network sometime. Your character designs resemble some of the creatures commonly found in the series, almost right down to your very designs.

bupaje · Post by **bupaje** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 7:02 am

jahnocli wrote:
bupaje wrote:If I had enough time I would have liked to add some water spray and volcanic smoke.
Get yourself down to odd job jack, and click on the "Free Jack" link. You can download complete artwork from episodes, INCLUDING special effects sequences like water, smoke etc. You'll need to download Bit Torrent if you haven't got it, and the files are HUGE, but well worth the wait.

Thanks for the suggestion. Didn't know there were special effects in there -must check those out. Be good if those were in one pack.

Is bit torrent secure/safe? If so maybe I can do it at work.

Try checking out Kaput & Zosky on the Nicktoons Network sometime. Your character designs resemble some of the creatures commonly found in the series, almost right down to your very designs.

Really!? I don't have cable but will try to find them on the net. Sounds interesting. Have to see where they are as I think we need to do our internship at the end of next semester.

As for the project I ran out of time. It ain't perfect, nor particularly good if the truth be told but my first short for the purposes of the class is 'officially' over. I couldn't figure out the sound and I had to cut the story from my original storyboards quite a bit to finish in the time alloted. Boy, I have a lot to learn - not only about the tools but about time and project management. :/

Anyway here it is. I will rework this during my semester break this week to see if if I can improve it so suggestionss are welcome.

http://www.stormvisions.com/2dcgi/PrimalSoup091706.swf

Thanks.

jahnocli · Post by **jahnocli** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:04 am

bupaje wrote:Is bit torrent secure/safe?

Well, it seems to be a bona fide company...it has a presence on the net, a CEO and everything...but like all these things, it's a decision you're going to have to make!
I work from home at present, and I too am PARANOID about security after one or two unfortunate incidents! But I use BitTorrent, and it doesn't seem to have given me any problems.

J

Bones3D · Post by **Bones3D** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:58 am

Here's kind of what I'm talking about... though there's a lot more than just these:

7feet · Post by **7feet** » Mon Sep 18, 2006 10:59 am

Yeah, torrents are pretty safe, but it's good to have a decent firewall, as with any distributed file sharing program your IP gets spread far and wide. I use the Azureus client myself. It's a good system to distribute large files without hammering your bandwidth. Beside the typical "sharing" stuff, it's used to distribute files from a number of places. Since this is the Whatever forum, I'm gonna pimp one, because I think it's cool, even though it don't have much to do with animamtion (sorry about any possible hijack, bupaje)

New Voyages

which is basically a bunch of folks who got together and decided that they wanted to make a continuation of the original Star Trek series (yeah, I'm a total geek). The producer, and the guy playing Kirk, was a rabid fan, and had built his own copy of the bridge - apparently, he bought the original set of plans from Desilu, so you know he's dedicated) and wanted to do something with it. Now they're 2 episodes in, with the third coming out at the end of the month. With Walter Koenig form the original series playing his original character as a mysteriously aging crewman, written by Dorothy Fontana (she wrote 36 episodes - hell, she wrote The Trouble With Tribbles), from a script that was meant for The New Generation but never made it in, but was adapetd for this. (Academy award winner) Kevin Haney doing the makeup, one of the guys who did the CGI for Enterprise doing the FX. Dang. Their next episode (shooting now) is starred by george Takei. Dang! And they have an agreement with Universal that as long as they don't try to make a profit, they can do what they like.

It's the fan film squared. The first one is a litttle shakey, the second much, much better. And the FX work is really nice. I'd like to work on it myself, but thy're shooting pretty far upstate (in NY) and it's a pain to get to, but I think it's a really cool project.

And, to get to my point, their main distrubution stream is through Bittorent. How else are you gonna send out a DVD quality product for a few million downloads without going broke?

So I like them, and I like Torrents. And the big dumb files from Odd Job Jack are pretty cool too.

Okay, after about 40 hours, I gotta go beddy bye. Looooong day. But if you liked the old Trek, check out New Voyages, you'll like it.