Unreality

A few weeks ago school started again. One of the new classes I got is ‘Audio Visual Media Production’. That’s a fancy name for ‘After Effects and stuff’. Only 4 weeks into the academic year I felt like taking a leap… Following the crazy idea of “If you can think it, you can make it“, I took my camcorder, recorded some footage, got back to my computer and started fighting my clumsiness in After Effects. Only a few hours later I finished a first version of my experiment. I spent today continuing and finishing this experiment.

The result is pretty much what I expected (although I am pretty embarrassed about the horrible arm-in-front-of-logo-disaster. Feel free to enlighten me on how to do this without making it look this bad ). Enough words, check it out!

This is my first shot at making something look good in After Effects. If there’s anything on your mind, let me know. I could use advice and feedback Read the rest of this entry »

Flash CS4 doesn’t like your FLA files!

I’ve been an early adopter of Adobe’s new Creative Suite which has been announced in October. At first glance everything seemed okay, and I really really REALLY enjoyed working with the new Flash IDE. The thing I liked the most were the panels which aren’t animated anymore. The panels still disappear when you click outside the IDE, but they disappear instantly. No laggy fading away.

Another cool thing is the workspace switcher. I never switched workspaces before CS4 because of the overhead: You had to go to ‘Window’ then go back down to ‘Workspaces’, and then you got to choose you workspace… If you already specified any…
Flash CS4 comes with a few standard workspaces and a very handy button, located in the main screen of Flash. Changing workspaces is really only one click away!

Next thing that drew my attention was the 3D capabilities which are now built-in. I have always been intrested in 3D, but I never really got to play with it. So I hoped Flash would allow me some playing around with it.
I must say: The built-in feature is pretty cool. You can actually draw 2D objects and then move them around in a 3D space. The bad thing? The 2D object will stay a 2D object. You can’t change the ‘depth’ of an object. You can only alter the width and the height of the object. That’s a turndown for me. Nonetheless: it’s cool!

But… Read the rest of this entry »