Inspirational Short

http://www.shortoftheweek.com/2011/03/13/thought-of-you/

     I found this flash animation short extremely moving. Normally when one thinks of animation (or when i do at least) i think fun, light animation often geared toward children. This short is mesmerizing and quite a cool site if you back further out of the video as well. Instead of using words and sound from the characters themselves, this artist was able to use motion and soundtrack to make this piece speak.

     By going to this link:
http://www.shortoftheweek.com/films/
You will be taken to the Film Directory where you can choose to see different films based on style (most pertinent to our class so you can choose flash animation), topic, or genre. For those aiming to continue in their animation studies this site will be a great resource for examples in other types of animation such as collage and 3D animation.

Have fun exploring!

New Media Exploration - Experiencing Music

Ahhhhh! Where to start! Identifying new media possibilities has made me feel like John Nash, the mathematician depicted in A Beautiful Mind, not the genius part, but the scenes where he is unable to harness his thoughts and writes on any remotely flat surface, walls, wood, post it notes, completely covering the interior of his garage. How do you begin to explain something that has limitless possibilities? We are on the cusp of being able to be anywhere are any time and have complete control of our experiences with new media techniques.

Wherever your interests lie: sports, music, television, art, etc., the experience is yours to create. Let’s narrow our focus on the direction multimedia is going with experiencing music. A quick and dirty chronicle of the evolution of experiencing music over the course of time includes: having to see it live to experience it; then came the development of radio; then phonographs enabled us to hear it at will; then music performances became televised; the next big thing was music videos; with the development of the internet interactive music videos became possible; subsequently we were able to select which instruments the band would perform for a song; and the most recent advancement in multimedia music technology can be witnessed through Chris Milk’s interactive film production of David Bowe’s  “Sound and Vision” performed by Beck. The “Sound and Vision” production demonstrates the ability to experience a concert from any location within a venue – even from a catwalk – with perfect sound quality using 360 cameras and 360 binaural microphones which makes for a true to life sound experience. The only thing missing is the smell from puffs of smoke floating through the air.

The “Sound and Vision” project really expanded my thoughts on where ideas will take us next. The first exciting thought that came to my mind was the effect it will have on televised events. For instance, an NFL game has several cameras at work during a game and a producer in a control room determining which angle we view. In the near future it seems very possible for every fan to select the camera/angle they wish to view at any given moment –or if they are like me and pay little attention to the field, they could span the crowd and sidelines for their own form of entertainment.

The evolution of multimedia music experiences can be seen on the following websites:

“Neon Bible,” Arcade Fire
http://www.beonlineb.com/ 

Incredibox
http://www.incredibox.com/en/#/application

 

“I’ve Seen Enough,” Cold War Kids
http://www.coldwarkids.com/iveseenenough/

 

David Bowe’s “Sound and Vision” performed by Beck / Video production by Chris Milk
http://loadbalancer.beck360-production.com/main/beck360.html

Artist Exploration- Bo Mathorne

The short film:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVkDrIacHJM
The making of:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnnbTaMXDqQ

This short is a creepy and dark animation about the undertaker. I love the animating style, and how everything flows together. the expressons of the characters, and the sound effects.
I have a draw towards most 'dark things', and this is just one video I couldn't help but share... It's not exactly a flash animation, it was done in MotionBuilder's Maya.

Die Anstalt: Curing Crazy Toys

 http://www.parapluesch.de/#

I recently rediscovered a site that I had found about a year or two ago. It is a German based site called Paraplusch: Psychiatry for abused Cuddlytoys. The main screen has two paths: an online shop and an attached flash game.

I mainly want to focus on the flash game, as the online shop has little-to-no flash and its main focus is to give people a means to buy the toys featured in the flash. The game is called Die Anstalt, or when translated, "The Asylum."

After choosing your language of choice and a brief, skippable intro, you play a doctor and your goal is to cure all your troubled toy patients. Currently, there are six toys to cure, though I believe they add a patient when they make a new toy for the online shop. Each toy has a different disorder and some are easier to cure than others.

Upon choosing a toy, you are given a variety of treatments to choose from. Depending on what you choose, you can either make progress in curing the patient...or you potentially make things much, much worse. Sometimes, the treatment you pick doesn't change anything at all. It all depends on the patient, for different disorders call for different treatments.

I found this to be a very enjoyable game. The animation is cute, simple and, for the most part, very smooth and very effective when it needs to be. I also enjoy the concept of game and the fact that it gives further depth and backstory to what is basically a quirky toyline. 

Studio/Artist Exploration: Brooke Jagoda

I came across a cool site that is the portfolio of a Canada/ Switzerland based digital design studio called In the Loop. The first thing you notice is how the word "Loop" follows your mouse. I liked how their color palate is mostly greys so it's a little sophisticated but the shape of the word "Loop" is much more organic looking and takes you back to wanting to play with Playdough.

The first thing I checked out was the tab titled "Works". They had quite a long client list. Most were
unidentifiable European projects. The only client I recognized was for Air Canada were users were encouraged to participate in the game-like interface that ultimately entered them into a contest. I didn't spend a lot of time investigating that site though. I was more intrigued with how they set up their own site.

After a little browsing around on my own finally discovered what the little icon is at the bottom center. You roll over it and it pops up to display more ice-cream shaped icons. When you roll over those you realize it's supposed to be like a game where you have to go and unlock the items to advance. I had some fun going along with it because a couple items were just goofy and others you had to tweet about the site or go and "like" it on Facebook. The one I liked the best asked the question "Who's the king of pop?" and then it promted you to type it at any time even though there was no field to type it in. And it worked! All I had to do was type Michael and I was able to advance a little bit.

From reading each of the developers descriptions under "About", it seems like they both have a big passion for designing digital media and creating a richer user experience. Well it worked for me! I feel like their work is set apart from others' because of the non-linear manner in which you can navigate their portfolio. I feel like the experience clean, and yet playful and innovative.

Here's another example of their work:

Siboire
This site had a nice layout, I liked the colors and the images they used throughout. It's a website for a brewery in France.  Everything is in French so I can't really tell how the information is organized. One thing I managed to come across was a description of their beers. On the home page there's a set of tiles you can click on. It's the center one with the light bulb. They don't only use images but also video of the head spilling over. Then you used the hand to swish to the next one. The only thing is that it takes forever to load.

New Media Exploration

I came across this site while I was reading this article about Flash. A developer was mentioning that flash would be non-existent soon and that he no longer uses it on his websites. But I was reading the comments and a lot of people were disagreeing especially when it came to interactive media. One of the people who commented posted a link to a site which I never been to before but it has over 11 million facebook likes. It's called  http://www.takethislollipop.com/

You log into the website using your Facebook account. It asked you to allow the site to access your friends and photo's just for the interactive experience. Then it shows this psycho guy going through your account and all your information and your pictures come up. Then google maps pops up and it shows your city and location. Then the guy jumps into his car and then supposedly drives to your location.

I think this was a pretty cool site. The interaction was pretty intense especially when it uses your actual pictures. It makes you wonder how the developer came up with this Idea. The way it was filmed looks very professional and where they filmed it definitely set the tone.

Design Exploration - We Choose the Moon (Aimee Robidoux)

The Flash-based site I found was wechoosethemoon.org, a website linked to the JFK Presidential Library and Museum site.

The site takes you through eleven stages of the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969, from launch to landing.  Each stage is an interactive scene, where the user can look at photo galleries and videos related to that particular phase, and listen to the actual audio transmissions sent back and forth from the mission control station and the spacecraft.  The user has the option to go through each phase in order, or, by using the Mission Tracker menu on the bottom of the interface, choose a stage from any part of the mission.

When the user first arrives at the site, there is an introductory page which gives instructions on how to navigate site.  A user’s eyes are immediately drawn to the center of the page (where the Apollo is), then left and right to the menus.  The eye stays longest on the Apollo, because the entire site revolves around its trip to the moon.

I thought the site very clearly conveyed it’s purpose, and was well-designed.  The layout is very simple, very facilitating to inexperienced users.  The buttons are very clear as to what they do and where they lead.  I saw no design elements that were distracting from the experience.

The site depends heavily on visual and audible information, with the animation of the space flight, and the mission transmissions.  There’s not a whole lot of textual information, but a lot of visual.  There’s no sense of clutter, everything is very sharp and clear.  In fact, there is an option to “clean up” the interface by making the menus retract.  The information is nicely packaged in little sections; some of it is only available when you click buttons on the page.

There is minimum typography differentiation.  It is all one font, but some of the type is all caps, the font size varies, and the type color in the Mission Tracker bar is blue instead of white.  The Mission Tracker menu bar is portrayed differently from the Mission Status and Transmission Menus, as it is an interactive image of the route Apollo 11 took, rather than text information.

The layout of the site is strongly aligned, with no design elements that are distracting.  Both Mission Status and Transmission menus are in close proximity to the Mission Tracker menu, and are directly across from one another. Everything is very uniform, categorized, organized.  The animation of the Apollo 11 is centered, but it doesn’t make it boring.  Everything is very balanced in terms of size and alignment.  This site has symmetrical balance (similar shape, size, color, weight, proportion, texture).  It is overlaid with dark tones, and brighter text: blues and blacks of the background, contrasted by white and light grey of the text.

The designers of this site were probably facing the problem of making the website interesting for adults, yet simple enough for younger people to enjoy as well.  For me, this site elicited a feeling of interest and fascination, and a bit of excitement as well.  Part of the emotional appeal is the running audio commentary from the original mission, which includes Neil Armstrong’s famous “one small step for man, one giant step for all mankind” line.  It gives an atmospheric feeling that you, the user, are a part of the mission.  And I think that that is what the designers set out to do.

Orisinal : an Uber cute Flash Game site

http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/


Orisinal has been one of my favorite pastime online. It is the brain child of Ferry Halim, a professional flash artist based out of Clovis, CA. He started this site for fun in 2000, and kept adding new games to it ever since.

His graphic style is clean, refreshing and whimsical. The game play is simple yet addictive, though wonderfully well rounded when it comes to user experience (he thought of all the conditions of game interactions).

My favorite games are "A Daily cup of tea", in which a team of 2 tiny mice tries to steal a whole cupboard full of sugar cubes, evading bouncing balls, falling books and bees. Another one of my favorites is "Cats", in which the player "herds" cats, its quite ingenious how he (presumably?) used the invisible buttons as cats.

He has since started developing/converting some of the popular games into iOS games. I have a couple of these games, and he has not only incorporated simple game play from Flash but also user experiences unique to iOS such as the accelerometer. I highly recommend these games (online and on iOS).

by Angela X. Wang

Flash presentation

This is the flash presentation I would like to submit to the class
http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/new-fantasyland/

As I was surfing for a good flash example I was not sure if some where flash or not
I liked this site because of it simplicity, and its magic appealing effect.
The sense of hierarchy is very strong through all the scene as the end comes only when everything was revealed.
It is a very easy site to use as its navigation is catered  for young viewers.
The pictures are very   artistic and blend easily with the static background as it interact during the
video or the slides show.
There is a good consistency in the use of navigation with the special effects and the active commands that take the viewer from one story to the other
The design is well balanced and in harmony as it goes from peace to drama, to tension and magic effects.
The videos have a good interaction with the main frame and background and blend perfectly as they
are playing.
Great drama effect with the storm, the lightning, the fire bobbles and the symbols of each stories
Even though it is a simple example of what can be done with flash I feel that the overall effect was
pleasing, interesting, amazing and well done.

Artist Exploration

www.joecartoon.com

This has been website that I like to look at for many years. I think the cartoons are very funny, and this one of the reasons I wanted to take this class. I want to be able to make this type of short animation in flash. Some of the cartoons are play only but some are interactive, letting the viewer decide on the outcome of cartoon by choosing options.