To go with the preacher scene, I was having to make a lot of 'sausage'-mouths for the kind-of-lip-syncing (I say kind of as there will be no actual words spoken, just the appearance of speech, so much easier). On the left you can see the first lot [painted sculpey] which turned out to not work as they need to bend around the curvature of head, and stuck out too much. So I moved onto the second batch (on the right) of all plasticine mouths, and toning the colour down a little.

As a part of this project I really wanted to get the story into a printable-book form, so I've been slowly converting images from the animation into a bit more of a kids-book-friendly-layout. It's all going pretty nicely, and I'm quite excited to see how it'll all look printed, even if it's awful, as it's my first time getting anything printed out as a nice book.

I doubt with the printing timescales involved it'll be ready for assessment, but I'm hoping I can have a few out for the show, all done and dusted.

Anyway, see above for a peep at a few of the pages.
  

It's all been a bit quiet for the past few days hasn't it? That'd be me beavering away on Flash for the cartoony segment of my film. See the bunch of assets above for an idea of the kid-friendly style I'm going for. Flash and me don't get along all that well, but this time things were going pretty smoothly, and I thought we'd put our previous quarrels behind us. That was up until I wanted to export the thing and somehow get it to a quicktime movie format.
Exporting straight to quicktime left frame-rate problems due to some high quality blurs I had happening, and the fact it only records as fast as it can render. Maybe I'm missing something but that's a bit awful.

Exporting to .swf was my next attempt, and all looked rosy with it to begin with. However, when it was imported into After Effects to convert to a .mov, quite a few of the Movie Clip symbols simply didn't play. There're probably people who know flash out there who have an easy answer to all this, but my Google-fu couldn't bring up any solutions.

Anyway, onto attempt 3: exporting as a Jpeg sequence, then re-compiling in After Effects. This time the masks didn't work properly and were visible during the entire animation.

The final solution was to export via .swf, however I had to convert all of the movie clip symbols into something more direct on the main timeline, which took a lot of faffing, and slowed me down a fair bit, but I got there in the end. I lost a couple of nice 'smoke-puff' effects I had in there during the process, but I don't think it's too much of a loss, plus I'm running out of time, so it's going to have to do for now. If I get some spare time later on I might go back and try and find a way to add them back in.

So yes, Flash. Hmm.





One of the problems I've had with flash in the past is everything looking so blocked-in colour-wise. I wanted to keep everything textural and a bit handmade looking for this piece, as well as keeping a more simplified cartoonish visual aesthetic, so have been producing all the assets in photoshop. Here are a few I'm working with as we speak, to give a bit of a taste of the style of this flash segment.

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