Skream Vid

this is the maddest video i've seen in ages. love the model, it's really nice how you can see the guys moving it. some nice animation too. the nature/city theme is a bit weak but the treatment is so hot it doesn't matter.

skraper

skraper from rob blake on Vimeo.



film and track made over the last few days. first attempts at maya and aftereffects. vocal from the brilliantly talented sarah johns, from mr beasley - myspace.com/mrbeasleymusic which was originally recorded for another track then time shifted to meet this one. track uses an expander side chain based on a drum to make it breathe.

given me a much better grasp of maya nd aftereffects cos i enjoyed making it and endeavoured to find solutions to problems rather than ways round them.

really not impressed by vimeo at the moment, facebook compression sees to be much better which is strange, this is really stuttery and rank, seeing as the video works off being smooth and clean.

i'm off to get good at after effects

dogletters

tutorial it took me about a week to finish with smoke effect letters, it;s a bit illegible though. i wanted to write nettodog but the masks didn't like all the holes


but theres some really nice techniques and tricks to be learned. here i got my head round ramp back ground generation, lights, and some of particle generating.

( this went from 326 mb to 646k - how mad is that!)

new Nicky

very quick learning tool for Nicky, a brilliant lad i work with who has a fairly strong form of autism. I thought computers (or at least the idea of a meta interface) is very relevant to his learning goals, so here is one of a few i have planned. The major draw back here is that the concept of a mouse pad being connected to something on a screen is quite tricky for him, so i made a large cursor - a trail would be useful too.

theres plenty more to do on these, to create a suite that will sequentially teach the very basics of interface command. but this is not a bad start.

all drawings/colour and writing by nicky.

potato bear

i was looking for a picture of supermarket shelves.

2nd life flicks

interesting flash site

nice site, think they make tshirts, but this is a bit lost in all the design. very solid site though, interesting stuff. (i was thinking about the name fresh labs for our company, which is how i bumped into this.)

creation myths

i could read these all day. we've been smothered by the most unimaginative and dry creation story (adam and eve) well dull. these are all amazing. love the african one that vomits the sky and earth and the mongol one about the archer shooting down the sun, and how race is explained as we are paired with different animals like sheep and swans, thats a much better way of putting it than the slightly offensive christian explanation. the hmong one is well creepy.
most of the them seem to have eggs in them.

really nice book cover

just thought this was a great bit of design, dead simple but it really works, i'd have done it in a burgundy or leaf green though.

ace phsics based game

great look to it . solid physics engine. really playable, similar to the gravity pods game i posted on a while ago.

lego animated flash game

this is pretty wack but the idea is sound, this was the process i wanted to use for a shoplifting game i was thinking about ( i really need to get on with that.)

wolf hunting. one of the games from interactive project.

games write up.

This project has been the one I’ve got most stuck into. I’ve learnt loads from it, and feel I’m getting a solid grasp of Flash in practice and its possibilities.
I didn’t really write much of the code in the games but took existing bits and tweaked them and put it together (though many thanks to Anna, Szymon and Pete for helping out loads). Major things that helped this work were the actionscript games book by friends of Ed, which is brilliantly simple and for the most part reliably written (though Szymon found a bug, good lad). Various blogs, which is where all this works - you have to be constantly finding answers and alternatives. I don’t really go in for tutorials much because I can’t seem to follow them, the shorter ones are effective, but for me the best way to learn is to pull stuff apart and rebuild it.
There are loads of little problems in the games I put together, such as the timer going wrong on the second time round in the sheep herding one. Also all the links go back to the intro rather than the snow scene (I should have done this as a separate FLA). One of the major issues was sound, it's well documented how rubbish sound is in flash. There are many weird glitchy problems that you have to solve along the way. In shoot wolf i wanted to turn the track down and leave the fx loud, i put in the mysound.setVolume(?20); command to turn it down but this worked until the first wolf was shot and then reverted to original volume - if anything i'd have expected it to carry on getting quieter as it would run the code again and the figure is a percentage. I couldn't work this out and instead altered the levels in logic pro.
Other issues are the return to main page buttons. most buttons use the brilliant geturl command to link to HTML pages. though like a fool i made the intro a scene in the index so it always goes back there. This is a bit of a shame but is easily fixable it just needs some dull page making work.

Despite the many mistakes in this I’m pleased with the results, I learnt to play a bit of piano especially, and as said before learnt a great deal. Flash is a really exciting (if infuriating!) program, and is part of the mediums where I really want to progress with during this course. I'm really interested in making games that use microphones and webcams, and this is something i am looking into.

(attached is a picture of the keyboard i used for the soundtrack. the classic SK5, which i got for 50p from a charity shop)