SIAN used FLASH! It's super effective!

...well, here's hoping the title is right anyway. I finished my Flash project and I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.



I ended up making about 11 different mouth shapes for the squirrel, while the bird in comparison had maybe 8 and the owl about 3. I found I could make better mouth movements by stretching the shape of the symbol and key framing rather than using a particularly complex mouth, although I only really started trying this out with the bird for the singing section.

The owl was supposed to have a larger part and move more, but seeing as he was relegated to chuckling I didn't see the point of making the body and head two seperate symbols. This turned out to be a bad move once I tried animating the laugh, and got completely the wrong mouth movements and found that it ended up looking like chewing, which coupled with no blinks made the owl more threatening than anything.

So I studied this jolly video, because nobody laughs like the Joker does-



-and found that the mouth movement seems to be largely irrelevant, and that the laugh is all in the shoulder and head movements, so I had to make my owl wobbly and less dead-eyed.

I tried to choose a lot of little movements in the way that the characters talk to make them have a little more personality than just lip syncing on its own. I would've put a background joke in somewhere like most of the creaure comfort shorts, but with three characters in he scene already I didn't want to completely overload it.



Along with a lot of updates in the blogs. I'm not going to post the initial sketches as the scanner didn't take kindly to the coloured pencil I used, but heres the image of the final room.

I made quite a few objects considering how much I loathed starting this project at the beginning of it (I say quite a few, it's more than my initial plan) but I didn't account for them in the final view, so the toothbrush, soap, drawings and the inside render of a plughole are not visible. Which is a shame, I really like that toothbrush but it wasn't a particularly dramatic angle to do the room from.
The thing I liked the most is probably the mirror, although it wasn't a massive stretch of effort to make a cube and flatten it I really enjoyed making the textures to use on this piece (although make isn't quite the right word, more used ones on sites but edited them multiple times in photoshop with other textures too) but the mirror is my favourite texture on there. I'll keep a copy of it in case I get the opportunity to use it something else.

I learnt an awful lot about Maya with this topic, and now that I've finished this project I'd quite like to make other environments just to start slowly finding out more about the program, so maybe a project during the holiday for me.
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I don't often post stuff I find that I like mainly because I don't tend to think about it when I'm viewing stuff, but I will this week.

This is the new Gorrilaz song out, "Stylo". I can't put the embeded code down I'm afraid, but heres the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9vAOzYz-Qs

I can't tell if this video has something of the uncanny about it, seeing as the characters really don't look human, but Murdoc looks really weird. Also, Bruce Willis and an android Noodle with a shotgun.

Something else I like having on as background noise is the Silent Hill music video Usagi because I find it quite catchy compared to the more questionable Fukuro and Kinoko, which just disturbs me with it's growing legs...

But it's good to watch too, using the in-game models of Robbie the Rabbit (who thankfully never got off the benches in the amusement park). What I like about the video and also the game in general is the strange aesthetic of it, sort of like a dank industrial building. I was very tempted to make my Maya room in this style but its not healthy to keep making the same style things time and again so I just went for a dirty room. I would like to try something like this though.