make a Flash cartoon.

On this yesterday. I could finish in a couple of days if not for the shows I’ve got scheduled this week.

I’ll get this done in early March.

But now, I’ve got some time to crank out some stupid little cartoons. Designed the characters, and I have the concepts, I think I’ll have one done by weeks end. Of course the quality is nil, but I’ll start slow and work my way up to slick.

I finished the first three, but I’ve had trouble with lesson 4. I guess I should try it when I’m not so tired.

The coolest feature is the voice sync—which in flash alone is really, really difficult. In terms of actual flexiblity, I think flash is a little ahead, but if you want to specifically do a cartoon style animation, you could do no better.

I think I’ve got the gist of it now. I think my loop will be a hat blowing around a character.

expressive when speaking. I’ve bumped into a really crappy thing since I’ve upgraded to tiger, one of the features I really like about poser that you can directly export a series of flash drawings in a cartoon format—causes the whole program crash. The poser patch looks like an excersise in futility, and of course reverting back to Panther is damn near impossible.

It’s cartoon features are pretty impressive when compared against 5. Hmmm, upgrades can be so expensive, I think I’ll just work with what I’ve got and see how it works out.

Anyway, the plan is to model characters in Poser, ajust them in Corel Paint Express and then import them to flash. The advantage to modeling is that if I want to do radical camera shifts, or if If I want to adjust things—it’ll be much easier.

That being said. Poser is complicated, as is Flash so in developing this little cartoon, I’m really sharpening my marketability. Of course, every high school kid will view the whole thing as intuition. Isn’t that always the way. I think its a skill, like my parents thought word processing was a marketable skill, but in a couple of years it’ll just be common knowlege. Like HTML, and Search Engines.

It was easy it only took me a few hours. I still have to model walk cycles and facial expressions, but all in all a very large step has been taken towards my goal.

A couple of months ago, with the intention of knocking this out. So far, apart from amassing kick-ass software and a wacom tablet, I haven’t made much progress. I guess it’s because I haven’t worked out my time just yet. I’ve got a wedding to plan, and three or four shorts on the burner in addition to a huge secret project—I just haven’t had the time. I’d almost like a partner, but then I’d miss out on all the marketable skills I could develop while creating this.