Who needs all those high-end sounds and graphics on proprietary gaming boxes?! Dragon Gamez hosts the Flash game "Stickman Madness" which proves you don't need hi-res to have a lot of fun.
The creators of the Canadian show Odd Job Jack will release all master flash files, bitmaps, art, props etc. of each episode every week. Also included will be tutorials and documentation so you can hack or remix to your hearts content via a Creative Commons license. Check for a new set every Monday via bittorrent. If you do anything with these files, post it in our comment section. Happy animating!
MDM Multimedia is celebrating its fourth birthday by hosting a Flash contest...actually TWO contests. They've set it up as a Designer Vs. Developer contest, but that's really not the case. It's really two different contests: one for designers and one for developers (a distinction that I've never really liked...I know that there has to be some division of duties in a business workflow, but the implication that a designer is the "creative" person and the developer is the "technical" person just doesn't sit right with me, nor has it ever been that clean-cut in my experience...end rant...). 
3D Stereogram is a neat little app that lets you make your own magic eye pictures. You start off at a blank canvas with various different pen tools. I don't know if there are any tricks to creating a good one so I just scribbled around. Next hit done and it will generate your magic eye with the necessary code to embed it elsewhere on the web. Not knowing how to exactly see the magic, I can't tell you if it works or not. Have a look at what I did and give it a try yourself.
Miltos Manetas has put together a nice time waster for your Monday afternoon. Create your own Jackson Pollock drip painting without all the mess at JacksonPollack.org. Great use of the Drawing API! I can't wait to show this to my 7-year-old...but I get to play with it for a while first...
Here's something to add a little laughter to your day...or a lot of laughter, depending on how you react to such things. So, just to play it safe, don't look at this in the middle of a meeting like John Dowdell did yesterday! Wait till you have a few minutes alone (or invite your closest cube-mates) and let it roll.
Regular readers know that I live in New Orleans. It's been nine months since Hurricane Katrina and the failings of our levee system laid waste to my home town. Even now, we're still dealing with the after effects. At least I'm one of the lucky ones. I get to live in my own house. Too many of my fellow citizens can't say the same.
So today has just been filled with toon related posts, hasn't it? In January, Scott Kurtz started a new animated
venture called PVP Alive. The short Flash-based animations were meant to bring PVP into a fully animated funny future,
but no new releases have come out since mid-January (for many reasons I'm sure). So head over to the PVP Alive page,
watch and laugh. The toons show how a still artist can easily use Flash to jump into motion and sound. Of course the
work isn't at the same level as Homestarrunner.com, but it is a good start.
Hopefully some Flasher traffic will incourage Kurtz to pump out some new animations.
No this isn't a boxing post, just a heads up to an animated short about a movie. Angry Alien Productions has
been making 30 second versions of classic movies for quite a while. In July of last year they started premiering
on the Starz network and then online. Their latest Brokeback
parody is really hard to quick so I've decided to just pass on a link to the Rocky story as portrayed by bunnies in
30 seconds. Why watch a two hour epic when you can just jump into Flash?
Well...how
fortuitous! The day that the Flash player hits PSPs, we get a tip to our inbox about ARComics.com. These guys are preparing to push animated comics to your PSP. "Preparing"
is an operative word here though. Not a lot of content at the site yet, and the newest press release is dated 2001.
Seems like these guys are preparing to inject some new life into their company. Glad to see someone jumping on the
chance to use the PSP as a Flash distribution channel though, so I'll keep an eye on them and hopefully, some cool
content will come out of it.
Jen deHaan just posted a "Site of the
Week" (don't know how Jen sticks to just one...there are so many...and so little time!) called "Denimbirds." Yes, they are a jeans company. They seem to be
Swedish. The site is very nice. Like, Jen, I like the transitions between sections. Nice use of masking. And while the
"Fit Guide" is more so you can see how their different cuts sit on a body (rather than what size will fit
your body), the turning of the models is a nice effect.
OK, that
subject line was just too easy, but I couldn't resist. It doesn't do justice to this site though. I don't know anything
about the band Less, but their site is really well-designed. I love the combination of the
2-D Flash animation with the stop-motion origami stuff (I have a soft spot in my heart for stop-motion animation...from
Rankin-Bass to Brothers Quay). Might have to listen the music
now...
We usually concerned with Flash as a means of
creating interactive, multimedia pieces for use on a personal computer, but Chris Georgenes reminds us that Flash can
be used for a lot more. Check out his article, "Migrating Flash Projects to
Video" on the Flash Dev Center site. He
has some great tips on taking your Flash movies to DVD and broadcast TV. I especially like the nod to Flashants' SWF2Video. A couple of years ago, I
had to reanimate pieces in AfterEffects for DVD menu backgrounds that I'd mocked up using coded animation in Flash
because I couldn't figure out how to output the dynamic Flash movie to video. More recently, I've seen GeoVid's Flash to Video Encoder at work and
been pleased with it, but I'm definitely going to check out SWF2Video now too!
Another fun Flash platform game. Fancy Pants Adventure has some really nice animation, good physics too...what dynamic hair you have
Mr Fancy Pants! The credit here is to ArmorGames.com, but that site
seems to be just another aggregator site. Following the link trail though, I find a credit for "DrNeroCF." Anybody know the doc? Nice work regardless!
Check out this Flash
game from Jenova Chen! Flow has great gameplay
based on the theories of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. If you've never taken the time to read
Csikszentmihalyi's Flow, it's worth a look. It's an interesting way of looking at interactive design in
general and game design in particular. Chen's application of the theory is somewhat literal here, but a great
illustration as well!
All contents copyright © 2003-2010, Weblogs, Inc. All rights reserved
Flash Insider is a member of the Weblogs, Inc. Network. Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Notify AOL
Other Weblogs Inc. Network blogs you might be interested in:
