Addictive games is a website full of addictive and fun games made using flash animation!
 
    I used to come to this site quite often when i was younger, usually as a distraction during school. My teachers didn't appreciate it but id found it handy, and now i appreciate it even more after taking this class! You will find an assortment of flash games with different genres on this website!

- http://www.addictinggames.com/

Interactive websites for stress relief

A few sites I've come across that are interactive and fun to play with. I found them, along with a number of others, on a post on tumblr stating they are good for people with anxiety/stress relief. Just fun sites to calm to you down and give you something simple to focus one.

In the first one you get to create your own galaxies

In this one you create interesting symmetrical designs

& lastly here is one to just let play when you need some calming sounds

enjoy!

Friv.com a planet of flash games!!

I would like to share with you the best website (in my opinion) for flash online games which called friv.com. I know this website for almost 5 years now I used to play its games everyday. It contain all kind of games different types for different ages, it allows you to surf the huge number of games and click on the thumbnail of the game you would like to play. It's an interesting website and I thought it worth sharing, hopefully you like it.

Link: friv.com

the cube , cheese & burger society !

For my exploration , i found this two animated website the first one is made by google its a game where you can travel the world with , and for the second website i found a cheese & burger catalog . i loved  the way you can surf between the pages .
 the cube : http://www.playmapscube.com/

cheese & burger society : http://www.cheeseandburger.com/ 

The "Miracle" of Kemono Friends

Recently, something has been done in the anime industry that hasn't quite happened before, at least, not to this extent. A studio known as Yaoyorozu was asked to produce an animated series based on a mobile game known as Kemono Friends. A lot of mobile games get their own series, but here's the problem: The Kemono Friends game ended service months before the show began production, the team creating it only consisted of ten people in an apartment, they had 500 days to complete it, and they had a 500,000 dollar budget. To put that in perspective, most anime studios consist of 90+ team members, and it only takes them about 9 months to finish a top tier production with a much larger budget. The team was essentially left with a product that was dead on arrival, but instead of giving up, the team decided to write their own extensive story for the series and severely cut the quality of animation in favor of making a quaint but fun show that destroyed everyone's ideas of how an anime production should be. In a stagnant industry full of tired tropes and demographic pandering, they set out to make something truly unique with the meager resources they had. No one expected anything from them, and they used that to their advantage. When Kemono Friends finally aired, it was met with the criticisms one would expect. Many thrashed the show for it's awful animation quality, but what they didn't know was that it was building up to something much greater. By the fourth episode, most people were hooked. The plot thus far had been about a girl living on an abandoned island that used to be a zoo. She meets another girl who happens to be a serval, and learns that all the animals on the island have been turned into human-like beings known as "Friends". The girl does not know what species she is, so serval gives her the name Kaban, which means "bag" due to the fact she wears a backpack. She and serval set off to discover what kind of "Friend" she is. Of course, the viewer instantly, and correctly assumes she is a true human, but the real mystery is the nature of the island they live on and the nature of the Friends. As we get to episode 4, we learn a little bit about the strange history of the island, and the alien menace it's inhabitants spend their days avoiding known as the "Ceruleans". By the end of the series, as long as you are willing to look deeper, every question brought up in the series is answered in a satisfying manner, and upon a second viewing, you realize that everything was foreshadowed in the very first episode, and I mean EVERYTHING. The show carries an underlying theme of existentialism to keep it's otherwise calm and almost childish setting interesting. Folks who stuck around in spite of the horrible CG absolutely loved it, and it rose to the top of the charts for the season, and it is the second most tweeted thing on twitter. Sales on Kemono Friends merchandise sky-rocketed, and so did attendance at zoos. The anime industry is full of success stories, but none of this caliber. Many people now refer to it as "the Miracle of Kemono Friends" and it will be interesting to see how it changes the industry landscape. Hopefully studios will go back to focusing on trying to tell good stories again instead of selling blu-rays to a niche audience. Here's an interesting video about it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkCMRBWYoKc

Incredibox

For my exploration, I found an interactive website that focuses on music again.
This website is called Incredibox. The basic idea is that you have five groups, that add to the song in their own way. Instruments/percussion's/effects/chorus/and voices. And for each section, there is an animated character who sings the selected sound.

So after piecing together each section, you should eventually be able to form a song/beat! It is really fun and a great way to pass time. It is really interesting how people combine music and animation to art work.

Animation Smears

When viewing something in motion, it tends to blur at certain speeds. Your eye simply cant register each "frame" of motion, so it compensates. In animation, this can be applied through smearing. Smearing is a simulation of that motion blur, hand drawn in a warped way to only be seen for single frames and replicate that visual phenomena. The Animation Smears Tumblr collects as many of these smears as possible, showing off how a single frame can be a surreal work of art on its own.

Weather and Music

For my second blog I found this other website called Climatune presented by Spotify and AccuWeather. This website makes a connection between weather and music in which  the weather can have an impact on what the people are listening to.  In this website, you can see the weather depending on where you are located with animation and interactivity, but at the same time listening to a playlist regarding the weather.  Spotify and AccuWeather stated on their website " analyzed the music from each weather type with acoustic attributes developed at The Echo Nest that 'listen' to music and measure things like energy level and valence, or how happy or sad a song is likely to be, based purely on how it sounds." You can also click to see what happens in other weather conditions like snow, rain, sun and wind.  Its a pretty cool website because the weather goes with the music and at the same time there is interactive activities you can do for example if it is cloudy there is a 'cloudy spray can'  that you can move with your mouse and at the same time spray little foams of clouds around. It changes for every type of weather!


https://weather.withspotify.com



- Celina Campos

Species in Pieces

I found this website called Species-in-Pieces which combines creative interactivity and a bit of animation regarding  thirty species that are on the face of extinction. This website is created by Bryan James, and it is a CSS-based interactive exhibition celebrating evolutionary distinction. I really liked this website because it was very well crafted and I could tell that Bryan James took the time to do his research thoroughly on each species. I love his use of color combinations and how each time you click the next button the animal morphs in another animal smoothly. I like how he included videos and other websites to show his audience a bit more about the species.  This website is definitely engaging, interactive and at the same time educational.


http://www.species-in-pieces.com


                 -Celina Campos

flashy

http://www.tokyoplastic.com
http://www.tokyoplastic.com/


TOKYO PLASTIC ↟⟰⏫⇱⇧⇓⇑😊👽💥

This is one of the coolest animation blogs I've found. It's a London-based animation company showcasing their work for us on the interweb.
It has a BOLD interface, showcasing all of their work in a simple yet fascinating display. It's huge bright colors draw the eye towards the work, simple not complicated, making easy for the viewer to go through and explore.
All the different squares show a different project the animation company has made.
It ranges from sketches, drawings, to full on 3-dimensional animated scenes and movies. They're all so interesting, and humorous, definitely my type of entertainment.
The animations are well made, inspiring me to make my own. A very interesting one is a spin on tangled, with a hilarious twist at the end, must watch.
I love how they don't just box themselves in one type of animation style, they branch out into varying narratives.
The website layout is even fun just to navigate with its unique layout.

I give them a 10/10 professional neat and interesting design.



- Jessica Campos

Resources Exploration- Derek Forrester

While researching resources for Flash, I was a bit surprised the content and information was not abundant or easy to find.  A web search did have returns and resources, but not nearly as many as I am accustomed to.  FlashKit seems to be an excellent website to begin with, because it offers tutorials, sounds, fonts, and other Flash developer resources.  One of the most important aspects is that they have a Flash Resources Links library that allows users to post and rate other website resources for Flash/Animate.  This makes it a great bookmark page for your Flash resource needs, as it offers a full library of links that are rated by other users.  A4Flash offers a website with Flash templates of source code for making mini games like golf, shooting, kids, music and others.  They provide templates, introduction, multimedia programming and Flash presentation services.  I found this site interesting because the games are for sale and cost upwards of 300 dollars.   The templates are also described for educational purposes.  Such that you could buy the game and dissect it to learn how they made it.  FlashDaWeb is a resource site that offers articles, tips, tutorials, free components and sources codes drawn from their own experience in productions.  They offer insight into what developers create and what the market demands.   They can help your website become more visible on Google searches and can teach you website monetization strategies to add income to your site or blog.  PhotoShopGuy offers his personal collection of Flash files, templates, images, and personal portfolio he has collected over the years.  All the content is free to use for personal or commercial.  He also has tutorial videos specializing in Photoshop.  Overall, I found the Flash resource information much harder to find and realized that good links and resources could help a new developer a great deal with learning about Flash.

            

Not for Arachnophobes

I came across this really interesting stimulater, geared around a spider!

You can feed it, tug it, and move it around by it's tiny legs. I thought this was really cool from how realistic it was, and not only could you play with this spider, you could also toggle some characteristics.

There's options to change the height, weight, length, ect of the spider according to your preferences. He also seems to like following the mouse cursor.

Created by Tomas Eriksson--he  also seems to have a lot of other neat interactive flash pages.

Spider Flash

How CG can be so good you can't tell if its real or fake.

In the recently release movie Logan. The CG special affects are so spot on they look life like and at time you can't tell if its a real actor or a CG actor.

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/vfx/cg-actors-logan-never-knew-149013.html

I found this interactive world map site about flights it is very Well designed graphic. It is an interactive world map that tracks all the planes and flights routes in real time around the world.  It also includes several video and photos about the history the first commercial flight when it started.  It also has video about history of flight growth over the years. In one of the videos, It uses simple animation and graphics to conway information about usage of oil on transportation on flights.

The site is designed by kiln.net award winning visualization and digital journalism studio in London.

They use into an active graphics, maps, multimedia to tell a story and give information about history of flight.

 https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/aviation-100-years        The Guardian.com

I found another animation site called the dolly museum that was interesting. It combines paintings of dolly in 3-D environment. This is an interactive video named. Dreams of dolly 360 degrees. It is a 3-D animation.  It's makes you enter the world of three surrealism and you can navigate through it by the use of arrows to see his world from different angles, and perspective.

This interactive video was produced by Gooby Silverstein partners, in San Francisco, with cochairman Jeff and Goodbye, creative director, Adam Ravines, Roger Brown, Sam Luchini, and Mike Landry, art director Sam Luchini.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1eLeIocAcU.       Dreams of Dali: 360 video

I found this fascinating animation called loving Vincent trailer. It is the worlds first feature length painting animation film. It was published on February 20, 2016 as a trailer by Breakthrough Films. 

This is a very unique animation that they have used series of paintings of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings for animation. In this animation they separated the painting and animation process from each other. The movement was provided by live action by actors, combine with visual effects, CGI animation, hand specialist oil painters, creating the paintings.  They used 80 great painters to paint in Vincent's style, and learn enough about animation to create movement and feel about process of painting.  For the frames they had to change the sizes of the painting to be extended to size of the frame of the animation. They used real people under the paintings to see the movement on emotions of characters. They used character similar to the paintings to bring characters to life. They created 66,960 frames of oil paintings.

The founder and creative director of breakthrough films is Hugh Welchman Veltman received into thousand eight many Academy Awards in the category of short animated films for the production of Peter and the Wolf. They have received a total of 35 awards and nominations at major international film Festivals.The Director Dorota Kobiela is trained as a painter.

Director Dorota Kobiela trained as a painter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47h6pQ6StCk      Loving Vincent-trailer, Trailer 2016(web)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOtwJL4iV8s     Loving Vincent. Behind the scene

The Infinite Drum Machine

    For my exploration, I decided to dive a little bit deeper into music/sounds that are intertwined with animation. I came across this amazing website that just so happens to kill a lot of time.

Created by Kyle McDonald, Manny Tan, Yotam Mann, and friends at Google Creative Lab, The Infinite Drum Machine is a web-page that has samples/pulls sample sounds from the internet of everyday sounds. With this machine you can put together different samples from anything you could imagine and create a beat with them.

 I just thought it was extremely interesting and almost impossible to imagine all of the work that was put in to a web-page like this. It's also super fun to play with! Definitely a fun experiment.


  https://aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/drum-machine/view/

Video Animation Exploartion

I came across a website that showcases individual filmmaker's short films with some animation involved. This is a good site to get some inspiration on how to apply animation to video if you have a spark of interest. A majority of the films don't include animation but if you do enough research on the website you will come across some that do. I challenge you guys to create your own animated video.

Here is a link to the website: http://standardfilms.tv/

Studio/Artist Exploration - Nick DiLiberto / GORGON PICTURES INC.

I came across and article about a animated film maker who took it upon himself to begin his own, 1-man film studio and personally drew and fully animated an entire 80-min film completely by himself in 4 years.

Nick DiLiberto is a Canadian animator who has worked with House of Cool Studios and BioWare.

DiLiberto estimates the film includes roughly 1,000 scenes, which required a pace of one scene a day to meet his self-imposed four-year deadline. That meant 15-hour to 18-hour days.

For more in depth details of his story go HERE

GORGON PICTURES INC

Watch trailers:
TRAILER 1
TRAILER 2

Coguz: Random Scenes of the Subconscious

This interactive piece is a portfolio of sorts; a unique journey through the life of a man named Cankat Oguz. It was created using the CreateJS framework, which is the same framework used by the newest version of Adobe's Animate CC. CreateJS is a JavaScript framework compatible with HTML5 and CSS3. Combined, this trio allows for cross-platform viewing beyond the Flash player. Essentially, publishing files using JavaScript commands allows the animator to publish their work as a website, rather than as a Flash file which is dependent on the end-user having Flash Player installed on their system.

Karl has a great tutorial on integrating HTML5 Canvas and CreateJS into your interactive animations to make them cross-platform compatible. Check it out HERE.

The only apparent downfall to using HTML5 and JavaScript are the large file sizes of the graphics that can cause the website to load and run slowly.  

Memories of Phantasm by Manpuku Jinja

I wanted to share an interesting series of animated episodes by a small group of animators known as Manpuku Jinja. Not much is known about them, since Japanese fan-work circles tend to be fairly reclusive, but it seems that their team consists of around five members. The amazing thing about them is that they have produced the single most high quality animated series based of the absurdly popular indie videogame franchise "Touhou". The Touhou series has so many different fan-works and animations that they could probably blot out the sky, but never has something as extensive as Manpuku Jinja's "Memories of Phantasm" been produced. They paved the way for high quality Touhou themed animations, since many other groups are now trying there hands at it. What stands out is the professional level of animation quality that is typically seen in official anime that would normally air on television. In fact, it's no stretch to say that it's better than many of them. Each episode of Memories of Phantasm takes about half a year to create, which further shows the skill of the small team involved. They also show an immense amount of knowledge of the Touhou universe, and have perfectly portrayed the fantasy world of Gensokyo in which it takes place. Below is the very first introduction animation made to showcase the series.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKIAqd2eN9o

Design Exploration: Animator vs. Animation / Mr. Doob

I've decided to show off 2 different pieces that I found. I think they compliment each other quite nicely, since one is story-rich 2D animation, and the other is interactive design with no story behind it. The first is definitely the more popular of the two, and it's a series called "Animator vs. Animation," by Alan Becker.

(Here's a link to a playlist I made: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmOjLD6Y_3LFCZLqePwdpciBF1DHArXA6)

The first episode actually debuted on Newgrounds on June 3rd, 2006. Since then, he's made three more for a total of four episodes, excluding the Minecraft-themed one. The premise is as the title implies: an animator who made an animation that he can't control, and is trying to destroy his computer. I chose this series as my first pick because it's made entirely in Flash/Animate CC, and Alan even has a separate channel (with over 200,000 subscribers) devoted entirely to Flash/Animate CC tutorials.

The second part is this site I found years ago, called mrdoob.com.

It's so old that the blog he has listed doesn't even exist anymore. Mr. Doob has a real name, and its Ricardo Cabello. He's a self described "Award losing non creative junior developer." He does tons of 3D modeling and animation work along with his developer work, but this mrdoob.com place seems to be a dumping ground for all the things he made over the years that he didn't know what to do with. Some of them don't make any sense, but some are really amazing, especially for when they were created (most of them were 2009-2010). A few of them are entire interactive stories themselves.

Shake It Off: A rotoscope experiment

For a class project, 49 students at the University of Newcastle in Australia rotoscoped the video for Taylor Swift's hit song, Shake It Off. Each were provided with 52 frames, then proceeded to splice them all together to make a full video experience.

While not exactly an interactive demonstration, it should definitely provide a look at the variety of methods to be taken with a method our class has become familiar with.

New Media Exploration: Technology DForrester

When people think of virtual reality, they often relate the concept and intent to video gaming.  A way for gamers to fully envelop themselves in an artificial surrounding for the purposes of a more immersive gaming experience.  But virtual reality has the potential for so much more and it will soon be integrated into a dynamic multimedia experience that can and likely will, revolutionize the design, production and experience of internet content.  As we know it now, our interactive media is mostly displayed in a 16:9 aspect ratio format that presents a small window into the marvel of internet technology.  We sit within our organic world and gaze into a window of the digital world, always separated by the obvious border between the two realities.  Virtual reality, when used for interactive media purposes, will completely destroy that border.  Imagine if instead of going to a website, you went inside a website.  Your search brought you to a virtual door and when you activate the door to open, you step inside a website’s design that surrounds you with a virtual room tailored to their artistic tastes and principles of design.  At first, it may be difficult to full grasp the extent that virtual reality technology will change multimedia and the limitless applications that it presents.  Attached is a video that demonstrates just one small example of how you could enter inside a website and become immersed in their multimedia experience.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMzh-s8qeSo

Imagine if the website had 3D icons that you could virtually interact with, that take you to new rooms, new environments, new places.  Companies are working on 3D photos that will virtually take you anywhere in the world and submerse you in life like photographic replica environments.  The possibilities on a flat screen are indeed limitless but in virtual reality, the interactive multimedia experience will overwhelm the senses and allow developers to engage their audiences in ways never before thought possible.

Solace

A very interesting and interactive example of story telling. You are hearing the story of Solace, a drink with 6 different potential flavors. You are able to play around with different physics and animations as the story progresses! 

"Solace is an interactive, animated film by Evan Boehm based on celebrated science fiction writer Jeff Noon’s short story about a near future in which marketing and addiction are disturbingly intertwined."

Solace Interactive Story

Design Exploration: Hello Sour Sally

Write about this site and what makes it compelling or well-designed.

Make sure to include a link to the site or experience that you're discussing: http://www.mysoursally.com/