Cyanide and Happiness

Sorry I had to post this, I love these online comic strips! :)


Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

Animation Renders

Here is my two characters for my final animation of the year. I haven't quite finished rigging them yet, hopfully I will find it more easier than my second animation to rig. I have used the sky light to light the scene. I hope to use omni lights to get as close to the lighting from sky light as it looks so good yet takes so long to render.





This is a close up of the penguin which looks like Feathers McGraw from Wallace and Gromit's second film The Wrong Trousers.





And here is a close up of the Polar Bear

Animation PG Tips AKA "Exploding Teapots"

This is my second animation the one where I had problems with the rigging. My third animation hopefully will be easier to rig like my first one.

Animation 3D TV

This was my first animation, I was really happy with it. It took so long to post as I have only just joined YouTube and figured out how to post movie clips onto my blog.

Web Design Banner

For my banner I chose the stand full banner format 468 X 60 to limit the space for my banner design. Looking through images on Google for logos I spotted the Arm and Hammer logo and remembered that I hadn’t seen an advert for the toothpaste for a number of years now.

At the start I wanted my banner covered with an invisible button, I didn’t want to get to the next scenes with an on rollover button as these banners are annoying. I wanted the product advertised by the banner only to be revealed in the last couple of scenes as you might not click on the banner otherwise.

As the banner was for a brand of toothpaste I wanted a bad smile for the first image. I searched for bad teeth in Google images, these were mainly rotten teeth which were even more hideous than the final image I chose, so didn’t use them. The teeth used were found on a search on dirty teeth. For contrast I wanted a nice clean smile for scene two of my banner. I wanted to reveal Arm and Hammer toothpaste in my third scene and to have a link to a website in the final scene. I wanted the website the banner linked to hopefully be Arm and Hammers own website, but the brand also produces other cleaning products and they use baking soda across their range. I did later find their toothpaste website so linked the final scene to that, but that happened much later in building the banner.

Across the scenes in the banner I put the images used on the right of the banner for consistency and the text on the left, since you read left to right. I wanted to animate the text on a loop increasing and decreasing in size until you click on the invisible button to go the next scene. The text used throughout the banner in all the scenes was the Times font. With hindsight looking back, I would have chosen Verdana or Arial as they are easy to read on the web. But it doesn’t matter that much on a simple flash banner.

The first scene with the dirty teeth and the “Want to improve your smile” text animation was on the black background. This was copied in scene two with the clean teeth and the changed animated text “Want a smile like this” for continuity in the scenes leading up to the banner scenes showing the product advertised. The images with the black backgrounds were edited in Photoshop and imported back into flash. For scene three since the Arm and Hammer logo is red on white background with a black illustration of an arm and hammer, I changed the background to white and changed the text in the banner to black. Another reason was to contrast the change in the banners background colour in the first two scenes and also because black text is used on the toothpaste box as shown in the image on the final scene of the banner. This also kept the brand identity as the Arm and Hammer logo and its background colour wasn’t changed in any way, which is probably most important of all in advertising the product.

I wanted scene three and four to be linked, so after the first invisible buttons on scene one and two, the next and final button would be the actual link button to the website the banner is for. To get to the final scene I wanted to keep the continuity in the banner and have the text in scene three increasing in size, but instead of getting smaller again the text would replaced in the next key frame with more small text which would also get bigger. “Then you need Arm and Hammer Baking Soda Toothpaste” would be revealed in four stages of increasing text, which would move on to the fourth and final scene. The final scene with the link to the arm and hammer website had a smaller invisible button only on the text, which I decided didn’t need any animation on it as was simply was the linking page.

To animate the text through out the banner I had to use Modify-Break Apart to change the text to a motion clip. A couple of times a problem occurred in the animation as some of the text changed size in a strange way and appeared to fold in on itself, it was corrected by deleting the text on a key frame and copy and pasting the text on the other key frame and resizing the text to fit.

The action script for the banner started off relatively straight forward. For the first two scenes I put a stop action on the scenes so the movie clip would just keep repeating itself until you click on the invisible button. The buttons in scene one and two had action script on them so after clicking the mouse on them the banner would move onto and play the next scene. The action script for scene three wasn’t as simple as the first two scenes as the movie kept repeating itself and wouldn’t move onto the last scene, until the time line in scene three was increased to the same length as the movie clip in the scene and the action script was taking out. I also had problems with the action script for the invisible button for the final scene which featured the external link. The text had to be edited down to a less complicated version, like the script on the first two buttons. I didn’t need to refer to the name of the invisible button in the action script I had done this, which is why it didn’t work at first.

I kept the design simple as I thought it would simply be used as a pop-up link to the toothpastes website, which would contain more information on the product advertised in the banner.

Web Design

This is my proposed design for a new myspace user page which I'm currently converting into a css page using dreamweaver. I will try to put in the older coursework I've done ASAP