RSS just happens to mean ‘smell‘ in the shadow tongue. Now it’s fixed! Big thanks to Vector for pinpointing the RSS problem for me, and Mr. Man whose link to feedburner.com was very helpful.

Go right ahead and subscribe to the Woodenblog now and each update will come to you directly without the need to come here and check! Just think, when I announce the release of Waterlollies, the news will come direct to your feed reader immediately.

You can subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon (). Firefox users will see this icon in the address bar at the top of this window. I still don’t know much about RSS so please feel free to make suggestions or corrections in the comments on this post.

Having signed up with feedburner.com I can now post this cool headline animator anywhere I can post HTML.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Click the bit that says “Grab this Headline Animator‘ if you’d like to display my headline animator on your site. I’d be very grateful and it’s just like linking to biteycastle.com, only taking it a little bit further :D

Waterlollies - word of the year.
Parts A and B are now fully complete. Music, sound, actionscript, everything! Not far to go now. After sensing a little negativity re: the wait for Waterlollies, I started a poll on the Brackenwood forum. I was slightly surprised, but very relieved at the (almost unanimous) result. Click here to see.

ToonBoom rocks!
It took me about a week to get into using ToonBoom Digital Pro, but omgwtfbbqbusinesscard! Bernard Derriman and I are working together on a freelance project for television. Using ToonBoom I’m gobsmacked daily by what the program can do. I only wish I could show some of it here, but perhaps soon I’ll do a short Brackenwood test and post it on the WoodenBlog.

Again, I will probably never abandon Flash because I’ll be maintaining Bitey Castle and making web shorts for years to come. I’ve got a list of ideas here for the next 30 shorts project :)

One to watch
Aside from being Brackenwood’s official number 1 fan, Nathan Viney is a talented writer of randomness and oddity. In twenty years time, they’ll be showing the following video on those “before they were famous” TV shows:
The Daily Crumb, 7 days: Cat Vomit, Have a laugh and Sports report

Thanks for reading, watching, subscribing to and supporting me.
Until next time when, who knows? It may be the big announcement.
Love from Phillips!

ShareThis

This week I walk into the room, looking around at your expecting faces. I’m reading your thoughts “It’s the 20th! I’ve been looking forward to this day all my life!”

A tear wells up in my nose and I decide that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I sniff as the tear begins to fall, but too late.. it falls out of my nose and cascades over my lips. Embarrassed and thinking fast, I try to hide it by bringing my coffee mug quickly up to my mouth. The edge of the mug cracks into my front teeth and scalding hot coffee splashes all over my nose and chin. I scream and blisters immediately begin to form.

You all look very surprised. Wasn’t September 20th supposed to be the happiest day in history? Blinking through even more tears, I regret to announce that due to unforeseen circumcisions, Christmas is cancelled this year. Waterlollies is coming soon, but no Christmas (conditions apply, see your religion for details).

Like I said in my previous post, with the movie now being in the hands of other people, it’s kinda difficult for me to give a finish date. However, the good news is that the scripting is done. Now the music is all that’s left and progress is moving fast.

–
Flash Forward Winners announced!

You beautiful people! 30 shorts took out People’s Choice, which stunned me when I heard. You need a LOT of votes to take out that award, so thankyou everyone who took the time to vote for me. At the link above, you’ll notice that Bernard Derriman won the Animation category, which earns his first orange rubber arrow (pff.. me? I got FIVE!!)

I animated an acceptance speech for the awards ceremony :P

–
Brackenwood.net

Where’d it go? Well, here’s a conversation I had on the subject recently:

Chluaid says: http://www.brackenwood.net/

The Daily Crumb says: :O:O:O
The Daily Crumb says: that either means…… you’ve deleted it, theres technical error or you’re uploading a new design
The Daily Crumb says: which one might it be :O

Chluaid says: it’s been stolen. I tried logging in to my control panel and it failed, so I emailed the host and he said that I had changed the password, removed the site and reassigned the nameservers.
Chluaid says: When I told him that I didn’t do any of that, he said that I must have given out my password. I asked if it was possible that I was hacked and he gave me this crap about how secure their system is, and how dare I suggest otherwise
Chluaid says: so I got a mate of mine who is a legal guy to write them a letter. They received the letter today and they had their lawyers look over it. They’ll get back to me on Monday

The Daily Crumb says: fak
The Daily Crumb says: :(

Chluaid says: Basically the letter states that my Brackenwood property is worth USD 4.5m and if the domain was stolen and irretrievable, they’ll be liable
Chluaid says: Whoever stole it has now got it shielded so you can’t lookup the whois database for their info. I’ll bet it’s a spam domain capitalising on Brackenwood popularity
Chluaid says: oh by the way, everything I’ve just said is a lie. I’ve reassigned the domain to Yahoo so I can set up the Brackenwood store next week :)

The Daily Crumb says: ……………..
The Daily Crumb says: ill get you for that
The Daily Crumb says: |-(

heheh.. I wish my Brackenwood property was worth USD 4.5m. I’d sell out, quick as ya like! Any buyers?
Anyway, there you have it, the Brackenwood store is coming in a matter of weeks :D
I’ll announce more in the next post but it’s an overhaul far beyond anything I’m capable of.. this one’s being handled by professionals, so you’ll see a good-sized range of Brackenwood items very soon.

–
ToonBoom Digital Pro

For me, learning to use ToonBoom Digital Pro has been a slightly bumpy road, but only because I’ve been working in Flash for 7 years. The documentation, tutorials and support are all very good, but if you’re a Flash user, my advice is: try not to think in Flash terms.. it’ll just confuse you if you try to translate your Flash knowledge to ToonBoom.

Anyway, it’s a hefty, robust, powerful TANK of an animation program though and I’m foreseeing some awesome opportunities for Brackenwood. Already I’m getting some great results on this project I’m working on with Bernard Derriman.

Don’t worry, I’m not about to abandon Flash.. after all, my audience is 100% internet and I’d be an idiot to alienate them. With ToonBoom though, I’m widening my scope and hopefully preparing for something big in Brackenwood’s future.

ShareThis

This week: Adam whines a bit about his health, shows some stuff he did a couple months ago for Wizards of the Coast, and updates the Waterlollies graph that has become so compulsory.

I’ve been given the all-clear to mention my work for Wizards of the Coast on a new ONLINE GAME of theirs called “Uncivilized: the Goblin Game“. This was yet another awesomely fun assignment, very similar to my 30 shorts project in which each day was a new and completely different challenge.

Without giving anything away about the game, I can reveal that my part of the job involved creating a few icon-sized graphics/animation, as well as a bunch of short animated scenarios (for which I also did a bit of voice acting) that play between levels of achievement in the game.

Here are some screenshots from those shorts:

Oasis

Scrub

Shakedown

For updates on the release of Uncivilized, keep an eye on Wizards of the Coast.

Dor ti sorek
Little things are starting to go wrong with me and I put them down as a direct result of my long hours at the computer, for around 80 hrs per week over 2-3 years. Headaches, stomach pain, sudden dizzy spells, backache and minor waves of nausea, not to mention bones and joints that simply hurt when I get out of the chair. My body clock is so out of whack from working all night and sleeping until midday, 7 days a week.

With a tear in my eye, I’ve decided to quit WoW for a little while and go back to my earlier routine of exercising in the back yard between 2-3am. Perhaps that’ll fix some of the biological mess that is my body.

Today was unusually warm for August in Sydney, so we went for a long walk around Iron Cove. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to feel sun and wind on my face. Gotta do more things like that.

Waterlollies
Thanks for the comments in the chatbox.. it’s required reading for me each day and gives me a much-needed boost.

Thanks (I think) to those few who aggressively demand a Waterlollies update and new graph. While those kinds of comments generally make me want to throw my pen in the air and quit, it does prove that there are people out there who are desperate to see the next Brackenwood. Keeping that in mind gives me the go-ahead nod that says ‘you’re doing something good’.

I can’t wait to release this movie cos I think it’s going to be great. Beyond Waterlollies though I can hear echoes from the future: “hurry up with the next one you lazy bastard!!“

I’ve removed the audio from the graph because it’ll only take a few days for each part so therefore, won’t be as slow-moving as the animation indicator. Speaking of which, Part C is about 4 minutes long so the graph will probably move slower week-by-week than A and B.

Love from Phillips.
x x x

ShareThis

You’ve probably noticed I’ve got a new chat box which I discovered after checking out the blog of a Woodenblog visitor. It’s from CBox.ws and so far it’s working nicely. It’s got a very easy-to-use Admin control panel which include moderation options and spam control. As you can see, it’s also fully customisable to the look of your site/page.

I’ve wanted a chat/shoutbox for a long time but never found one I liked, so this is an experiment that I’m happy with so far.

Crash [of] Course - followup

While trying to track down the bug and hopefully prevent it happening again, I think I’ve managed to pinpoint the cause, along with steps to reproduce. This is a habit I’ve developed from being a Flash beta tester over the last couple of years, so the steps below will give the development team something to go on.

OK I notice the crash happens rarely at the start of a day’s work but it’s reproducible almost 100% when I’ve been working for a longer period of time. This leads me to believe that the memory taken up by my History panel may be part of the problem.

The crash occurs when I’ve created a shape tween and I start to move vector points around using the sub-selection tool. Each time, the crash occurs when I then scrub the timeline on the shape tween.

So in summary:

1. A full History panel
2. Shape tween
3. Sub-select tool, moving points
4. Scrub timeline
5. CRAAAAAASH!!

Possible prevention:

• Clear History panel before tweaking the vector points in a shape tween.
• Lower the number of Undos in Edit > Preferences > General. The higher this figure, the more memory used.
• [Workaround?] Avoid having vector points visible when scrubbing the timeline. To hide vector points, switch to a tool (brush, selection, paint bucket) other than sub-select tool.

Another annoying little occurrence that has become more frequent just lately is a delay of about 1-2 seconds after I press Ctrl+Z (Undo). This probably also has something to do with my maximum undos (currently set to 100).

However, I discovered that the delay is eliminated if my Library is closed! Not just minimised or tucked away.. I mean CLOSED completely). That’s kinda understandable I guess, seeing how my Library for any major project contains thousands of symbols. Now I keep my Library closed all the time, only pressing F11 when I need it.

Therefore, it’s probable that the contributing factors for the delay are:

• High number of maximum undos (and full History panel)
• Large Library is open.

I can’t say whether or not Adobe would see these little grievances as worth, as epic-scale animation projects like these have the minority of Flash users.

OK here y’are! As you can see below, the storyboard is pretty much complete. Just a few layout, timing tweaks and scene juggling to go.

-lollygraph! Now with Audio thingy.

ShareThis

.. I ask myself the same question on every project these days. “Am I putting too much work into this drawing/effect/scene/movie?”

Usually the answer is something like “yes you are, but a movie is immortal“, so I press on. This week I finished one of the monster scenes in Waterlollies. It’s a water effect that’s on screen for all of 1 second (!) but the pencil mileage was excruciating. I don’t want to show the finished effect, but here is the linework from about 12-15 frames (below). Incidentally, linework is about 20% of my water effects, the other 80% is reflections, refraction, highlights, etc.. this particular scene was incredibly time-consuming.

Water linework - click to see larger

It does hurt to work on something for so long, only to miss it if you sneeze or blink. However that’s the nature of animation, especially effects. Bad effects animation is always distracting, whereas good effects animation passes by barely noticed (it’s never the effects animator’s job to upstage the characters, only add substance and realism to their world). All the same, it’s certainly encouraging to know there are people out there who pause my movies to look at these tiny details that I’ve taken the time to include.

The graph!

OK so there’s still a bit of work to do on part B, but I’ve started on part C. Nathan McCree has also begun to work on part B so I’m really looking forward to hearing what he does with it. Did I mention how amazed I am at his work on part A? Can’t wait for you to see/hear it :)

Extra, extra!
I added a few extra scenes to part B (hence the little incomplete bit on the graph) and I imagine I’ll be tweaking and adding bits to part C as I go. For this reason, the July 22 deadline is looking unlikely. Before you kill me though, just think.. if you kill me it’ll never get done! Besides, you can’t kill me.. I have a mouth to feed!

Just keep an eye on the blog and hopefully the updates will keep you interested until the movie’s release.

ShareThis