Simpleweb are holding the third in a series of Hack Nights in April. It will be ace.
I did some stills and .gifs to help promote the event.
I’m playing records again on the night. Which will be all the fun. Love playing records, me. If you’re in Bristol, you’re in the digital world, a developer and want to win prizes – you’ve found your event! Sign up here:
Join us!
Make it happen.
It’ll be awesome :D
Come!
Welcome to 2015. Year of… doing stuff.
Last year I did a little animated .gif for Simpleweb. We were giving away free websites to our clients. Yep, websites. For free. To our clients. Because Simpleweb are ace.
All I needed was the seed of an idea to pick up and run with… I got: “something to do with gifts maybe?”
But that was enough to kick off the train of thought: Gifts, presents, opening… whoOOosh – sparkles! This particular little animation was nice. I just shut my eyes in the kitchen (it was important the idea came in the kitchen. They usually happen in the shower or on the loo. Ideas, funny little buggers.) and I could see the animation play through.
So I drew a quick version of what I saw in my head:
I can’t remember what the numbers were in the top right. Must be important. Really important.
It only took a couple of hours to artwork, build and animate in Flash. Dead quick. Then it took another two hours to work out why the FLA corrupted so badly that it entirely locked me out of my computer. Once I’d gone in through a different user account and somehow re-activated my login, I re-built a new FLA from scratch and rendered the gif through Photoshop. The nerdy animator in me wanted to do a nice ribbon falling down into shot and settling, but I’d spent too much time fighting with Win7 and it was better off keeping it simple anyway. Job done.
Finally, life drawing starts again next week so its business as usual in blog town. I’m going to approach this year with 97% more experimentation. I want to do some quicker poses again in different media. Maybe some Big Sumi-e ink sketches on A2 paper, perhaps some outline work with ink pens or brush pens (thanks Mike) and colour them in later. Not really sure. Definitely want to try new things though. 2014 was the year of painting. I want more fun in 2015. Yes. Maybe I’ll go back to drawing more “spooky” twisted stuff as Imogen described it as. Yeah. More weird = more better. Push the boundaries of taste and acceptability a bit.
I work for Simpleweb. It is nice.
Simpleweb holds hack days called the Simpleweb Challenge. Hack days are opportunities for developers to have fun, network and win prizes.
The theme of this hack night was WebRTC video.
Tokbox – a webRTC streaming and archiving service kindly sponsored the event, which you can read all about here.
I helped out by putting together a couple of images and animated gifs to help promote the event.
I started out by brainstorming anything I could think of around streaming video with pen and paper. Scanned that in and applied SW brand colours
I cherry picked the best bits, cut them into a new composition and started rigging it for animation in Flash (*heart* Flash). I kept it as simple and short as possible – a 12 frame loop.
Its amazing what you can do with not very much… and a pimped version of Flash.
That’s the problem with animation though. No bugger ever sees it.
Dave Cropley 