Animators...Galore

lets first start with the obvious choice..walt disney. mickey mouse was walts first cartoon character and after 2 series of 2 cartoons he wanted to move onto feature length animations in 1934. but at that time Max Fleischer's Popeye The Sailor was more popular that Disney's' mickey mouse untill he re-coloured and redesigned the famous mouse.

Since Disney's ventures into animation and feature length films, Disney has become the most famous iconic animation of all time and the walt disney studios are still producing work today in the form of new films including recent titles such as Finding Nemo and Monsters inc. which have now harness the power of computer CGI.

Walt Disney holds the records for number of Academy Award nominations (with fifty-nine) and number of awarded Oscars (twenty-six)

making him and his studios the most successful animation studio ever.


MAX FLEISCHER

Most famous for the creator of Popeye the sailor man, betty boop and koko the clown. born to a jewish family in Poland but emigrated to USA in 1887.
Fleischer came up with a concept to simplify the process of animating movement by tracing frames of live action film. His patent for the Rotoscope was granted in 1915, although Max and his brother Dave Fleischer made their first cartoon using the device in 1914. Extensive use of this technique was made in Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell series for the first five years of the series, which started in 1919 and starred Koko the Clown and Fitz the dog.

when he released Popeye the sailer, this grew to become more popular that Disney's mickey mouse.Fleischer invented the "Bouncing Ball" technique for his " Ko-Ko Song Car-Tune" series of animated sing-along shorts. In 1925, Fleischer added synchronized sound to this series, using the Phonofilm sound-on-film process developed by Lee de Forest; these Song Car-tunes would last until 1927, just a few months before the actual start of the sound era. This was before Walt Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928), which is often mistakenly cited as the first cartoon to synchronize sound with animation.

Final Podcast and evaluation

here is the final podcast attempt for the ubiquitous city brief :)



ouch the quality :/

Evaluation: Podcast on the Microsoft Surface

I studied the new Microsoft surface as my chosen piece of technology to do my podcast about. I found it really interesting how so many people will be able to interact with the interface without any previous knowledge of computers. Anyone can use it. It makes browsing photos, paying for bills at restaurants and transferring files to mobile devices incredibly easy, thus avoiding complicated interfaces previously used by Microsoft. This is the future of home computing and retail businesses and has the potential to be something amazing in the future making this a valuable piece in the fight for ubiquitous cities.
For my project I used a method of recording text to speech using windows speech tool and Microsoft Sam’s voice. I had to record the speech in bursts of 30 seconds each using sound recorder (XP tools). I then gathered images of the Microsoft surface I had found whilst researching the technology and pasted them together, synchronising with the speech I had knitted together using windows movie maker. The only real problem I had come across was some feedback caused by the computer tower and the surround sound system installed on the desktop computer. This meant the voices have a really deep bassy tone to them with some slight distortion. I did however manage to combat this slightly by adjusting levels of volume and pitch in order to stabilise the sounds as best I could.
If I was to adjust anything I would detach my surround sound system and mover the tower onto the floor in order to try to get a clearer sound. That being said the microphone should then be able to pick up clearer signals from the speakers. This should mean the quality of the podcast should be much better.
Other minor problems, rather inconveniences were the fact that the sound recording device would only last for a minute, whilst the text to speech converter was only able to manage around 200/300 characters, which caused trouble since I had to record 7 bits of speech instead of only 1. The technique of the stitching could also have probably been made a bit better by using final cut pro. These means I could have blended the transitions from each of the sound clips together better and edit the actual sounds much with much more detail. I could have also made better transitions between the images had I used final cut pro providing a better experience through the video.
Overall I found the project to be a success and enjoyed the experience of my first video pod cast. I learn different techniques on how to produce a pod cast but also about the new technological advances what will change how we live in the near future.

Microsoft Surface +

http://www.microsoft.com/surface/index.html

Incredible ^

the new micrsoft surface, capably of accessing cameras, mobile telephones and credit cards for easy sharing of images, videos and even the splitting of the bill via credit cards providing a much easier way of sharing a restaurant bill.

it reacts to fingers, brushes and all everyday items allowing you to paint, move objects on the table like surface and control access to mobile devises from the microsoft surface. It has the ability to set coordinates on a GPS system or a mobile phone for day trips.

you can even order food in restaurants from the table itself before paying the bill via the microsoft surface..amazing.

they have been put into effect allready at Sheridan hotels.

go see it now,see the world of tomorrow!!

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browisng youtube the other day for my favourite band "Tool" i found this video which i found extreamly disturbing but visually/technically really great. it fit perfectly with the theme of the song and the issues discussed.


excellent visual composition by 'morgasmo'. highly disturbing still.

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20th Dec

DAVID GUETTA :D

RFID TAGS???

Radio-Frequency Identification tags...

what are they?

it is an automatic identification method which can transmit and receive data using the RF ID tags and a RF ID receiver.

These can be available in cars, animal or people for uses such as tracking via radio frequencies emitted by the tags.

the tags themselves are based on 2 parts of the piece of technology,

1. the integrated circuit for storing and processing the data which the RF tag captures.

2. the antenna which is used for sending a receiving data.

they have already been put to use in places like libraries, retail stores and for tracking lost animals/pets and can now be applied to humans, the only problem is a power source for these tags.

Animation Such An Aggrevation (8)

the new animation brief is completely up and running now with little issues concerning my ideas for the web splash i want to produce. i want to make my animation based on the marvel comics and i hope to use spiderman in the animation itself.

my idea is to have spiderman in the distance on a building with a red background ( in effect a sky) and have him swing towards the foreground and slap the marvel logo on the screen. this will either effectively "crack" the camera or i could have him fire web towards the screen embedding the logo in the web. that will be much more difficult though as this is my 1st animation.

i will post up some initial drawing soon in order to get a basic idea for the sequence.

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In other News

Ive been made Moderator at slashTHREE which is great news for me, i was an artist before but picked up my promotion yesterday fr my activity and dedication to the website

Check it out here

SlashTHREE

woohoo

ramblings o0

the slashthree website has released their latest and greatest artpack: 30th Century which is the sites 8th release and with some amazing pieces of digital art,photography and audio submissions, i had 5 submissions including 3 collaborations with my good Dutch friend Larn Van De Vries. 4 Photos and 1 audio submission. be sure to check out my entries and leave any feedback on my deviantart. DeviantART

SlashTHREE

Visit the artpack now :)

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Camera NEWS!!!

hopefully within the week i will be buying a Nikkor 50mm f1.8 for my Nikon d40x (yes ill have to manual focus as their is no AF :O

but i reckon ill be able to pick it up for around £50 which is a bit of a bargain :)

hopefully in december, probably my birthday i hope to get enough money to get a new tripod with an adjustable head this time, im looking at a Manfrotto 190xprob.

so i should be moving forward in that department especially before my visit to Amsterdam.

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Bend It Like Beckham!!!

After our animatic for college we went out and filmed the footage, edited it using final cut pro and uploaded to youtube

you can find it here



one problem is the quality, its was origianally shot in HD but the conversion to quicktime affected it somehow...but still a success in what we wanted to acheive.

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Short Animatic...Bend It Like Beckham

yea...Our first animatic. we used final cut pro to convert the drawings into a sequence of clips supporting our idea for our "how to" video.

some problems have been revealed to us during the production of the animatic such as how time consuming it will be for one of us to get the perfect free kick into the top corner of the net.Also keeping the line of direction correct when all the shots re made to keep the video flowing perfectly.


expect to see the final version soon :D

On A Scale Of Average To Poor....

<sub>so yep...lets get the ball-a-rolling.

College life has started and the first design piece has been posted/created. due to the size of the piece i wasn't able to apply my full potential to it by due to the fact i work on a smaller scale which Ive become accustom to. so its not really up to scratch in my opinion. almost reminded me of a piece i worked on almost at the start of my time engaging in photoshop. All in all i wasnt overly pleased with the final outcome, especially as i tend to spend weeks on just one image/photo etc.

take a look anyway...


Bare in mind the jpeg artifact is shocking on this one, but for your view pleasure the file size is small for a quicker load

enjoy ^^</sub>