Monday, April 30, 2007

Super Dynamic Photo Gallery



Super Dynamic, but also super cool. The coolness is a little hard to explain blog-style, so I beg you to visit the main sales page on this one and check out the nifty features of this gallery. I think its two-fold, first its just a quick zippy way of jumping from thumbnail to fullsize image. But second, you can use query string variables to control where the Flash file decides to look for an image sequence, as well as, different folders. Don't get it? Did that fly right over your head? Probably so, but check out the bottom portion of the sales page for this one, and I've laid it out in less geeky terms.

Check it... Super Dynamic Photo Gallery

Animate a Ninja!



What's so great about ninjas? Aren't they usually quiet and just sitting in trees eating bamboo sandwiches that their ninja wives packed them for lunch? True... Except when its time to jump around and kick and punch and slice up stuff and generally go berserk. Fortunately for us, safe at home, that flurry of action makes a for great movement study. And in a way, we animators, are the ninjas of the 21rst century. Albeit, dorks too.

This Flash tutorial is a whooping 4 hours, but only $15. And aside from just teaching various types of movement, there's also some clever illustration techniques that will save time drawing new positions (and new frames) for your ninja. There is NOT much motion tweening to this tutorial series. The animation is a die-hard frame-by-framer. So don't think you can get away with hitting the Tween button. Do that, and you'll lose a hand.

Also discussed are some export techniques for getting that pur-dy animation to Quicktime.

Full details and the finished animation created during the lesson, are here... Animate a Ninja!