Going Gaga for Flash animation
I’ve been advising a motion graphics artist in the creation of an ongoing series of topical animations designed to simulate a moving comic strip and containing topical references to celebrities and their lives.
Designer Debra Danu Matthews at Artistic Navigator came up with the idea of the Celebrity Toy Chest after being commissioned to produce cartoon animations based upon Baddiel & Skinner’s World Cup 2010 podcasts for Absolute Radio. For that series, Absolute provided an short edited audio track distilled from that week’s radio show; Debi’s task was to produce a topical animation on a rapid 24-hour turnaround that could be published as a video podcast by the station. It wasn’t easy – but we got there and the client was happy!
My role, in that context as it is in this, was to take Debi’s Adobe Flash animations, convert them to an editable full-HD video format (1920×1080) and then synchronise Stevie Martin’s audio tracks before producing an output master and sub-master as 1080p and 720p respectively. Finished 720p files are then uploaded to YouTube from where embed feeds are then derived.
Here’s the most recent animation in which some inner secrets relating to Lady Gaga’s meteoric rise to fame are revealed.
Platform-Agnostic output formatting
These days, of course, it’s important to ensure that animation which starts out as Adobe Flash is formatted in a manner appropriate to the whole range of display devices – ranging from standard web to iPads, iPhones, Android and Windows devices. That’s why MPEG-4/H.264 was chosen as the final export format.
If you have similar requirements for a workflow that produces output suitable for an ever-widening range of display devices, then please Contact me asap!
New “How to” screencasts nearly ready
I’ve been spending a lot of time creating a new set of screencast tutorial videos designed to guide complete newbies through the process of importing, editing and sharing their digital video movies using MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 17.
Editing a MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 17 Screencast with Camtasia
As you can see in the screengrab above (in which the actual tutorial movie is being edited in Camtasia on my Apple Mac computer), there’s quite a lot of work involved in recording everything that takes place on the computer screen as well my spoken commentary detailing what I’m doing at at given stage. The screencast is created with Camtasia, a fabulous piece of software that makes a video and audio movie of everything that you see and hear on the computer screen and is designed with precisely this kind of use in mind.
I undertook a similar production task back in 2009 with my first set of tutorial DVDs – Getting Started with Premiere Elements 7 – which have all but sold out!
The current set of tutorials will soon be ready to purchase as downloads and will be available on a sister site, SimplyDV.tv
New home and new look website!
Yes, that's me there.
Welcome to the blog section of the new and improved website. Having just changed over to WordPress and moved to a new server, there are still areas of the site that are in the process of being updated.
The aim (as is the case with many personal websites) is to offer some kind of insight into who I am, what I’ve done over the years and – more importantly – what I’m able to offer to prospective project partners and clientele.
It’s always difficult to know what information to include in a site like this that doesn’t either overwhelm visitors with textual information or sales puff; I’ve learned that the best way you can to know me and what I do is to get the back-story while finding out what makes me tick.
So that’s what I’ll aim to do here.