Oct 02 2011
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Animation, Falling Lizard

The First Falling lizard

As I’ve said elsewhere, almost every year I participate in Falling Lizard, the annual let’s-make-a-film-in-a-weekend party at the UCLA animation workshop.  The first year I participated was a year and a half before I actually started in the program.  My theory was that if I showed my face and enthusiasm enough then they’d have to accept me into the program.  I guess it worked, since I was accepted on my first try in 2003 :)

The first Falling Lizard I attended had the theme “creation myths”. I put together a happy little film about what the first day might have been like. From concept to completion I created this piece in about 52 hours, completely analog and old-school. Presented here is a modest update, remastered in Flash and converted to widescreen. Enjoy!

Sep 30 2011
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Flash Tools, Rant, WindowSWF

Flash Panel Extension: Autosaver

Every time a new version of Flash is released I get excited and hopeful. On each new version, though, the excitement and hope is less and less. Adobe just never seems to address areas that I think need addressing.  Sometimes they even make things worse, such as in the transition from CS4 to CS5. CS5 and CS5.5 have this problem with a delay in updating the stage after executing a JSFL command.  It makes several of my commands much less useful, and I wasn’t ever able to figure out a workaround.  It impacts my workflow so much that I still don’t use Flash CS5 if I don’t have to.

One thing that they did do right, though, was adding auto-save to Flash CS5.5.  It boggled my mind why it was missing for so many years, particularly in a program that crashes as much as Flash does. Who can say what lurks in the minds of the Flash architects?  At least it arrived eventually and people can finally be secure that they aren’t going to lose their work if Flash crashes.

What, then, about the rest of us who haven’t upgraded?  Several years ago, long before CS5.5 existed, I got frustrated with the lack of autosave so I went out looking for a plugin that would do the job for me.  I found this auto-save WindowSWF panel, one that was a little too basic for me.  It had several fundamental problems that made it, in the end, not quite good enough. First, its layout is poor, making it take a lot of screen real-estate.  Second, it’s disabled by default, and it doesn’t remember its previous setting when Flash is started (meaning you have to remember to set it going every time you start Flash).  Third, it saves over the current file and you can’t roll back to a previous version unless you were careful to save off iterations manually.

So I had finally had enough and I sat down to write a better one.  I ended up making one that works through the same basic system – a WindowSWF panel – but much more thought-out and featureful. Here’s what mine looks like:

image

There are three controls here.

  • Minutes between saves: controls how often the autosaver will save your file
  • Keep how many old copies: you can have it keep up to nine old versions of your file.  All the old files are stored in a subfolder of the folder your FLA is in, so your main directory doesn’t get cluttered with autosave files.
  • Enable: disables the autosaver if it’s unchecked.
  • Additionally, there’s a readout of how long it’ll be until the next auto-save, based on how long it’s been since the file was first modified.

One key thing to note is that this autosaver remembers its state, so it’ll come up exactly how you left it when you last had it open.  That means that it just works and you don’t have to think about it most of the time – a vital feature of a safety backup tool like this.

Since it’s a WindowSWF, though, you have to keep it open all the time.  If you collapse or dismiss the window it will stop running.  Unfortunately that just seems to be the way these things work, so it’s not totally foolproof.

David’s Autosaver installer

Sep 30 2011
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Flash Commands, Flash Tools

Flash JSFL Commands: Fun with Transforms

Usually, the tools that Flash provides natively are sufficient for dealing with transforms (the details of a symbol’s position, rotation, skew, and scale).  Sometimes, though, you need a little more.  I’m going to introduce two tools today that provide more flexibility in resetting symbols back to their default transform.

Reset Transform (improved)

When you hit ctrl-shift-Z in Flash it’ll reset the transform of all the selected symbols back to their default state.  That means 100% scale, with no rotation or skew.  But what if you want the default scale/rotation/skew to be something different?  Wouldn’t it be nice if you could define an arbitrary transform that you wanted ctrl-shift-Z to reset a symbol back to?

As you may have guessed, I’ve created just such a thing. It includes two Flash commands.

  1. The first creates a reference symbol that has your definitions of your symbols’ default state.  All you have to do is put all your symbols on the stage in the position you’d like them to be in by default and call Commands->Create symbol scale reference. That creates a symbol in your library called _symbol_scale_reference in which all your symbols you had selected now reside, defining their default transform.
  2. The is the command that does the resetting.  It simply takes the selected symbols and changes their transforms to match whatever is in _symbol_scale_reference.  If the reference symbol doesn’t exist then the command’s operation is identical to the standard Reset Transform command. I recommend switching your ctrl-shift-Z keyboard shortcut over to this command, since it’s functionally the same as the original Reset Transform but with the added functionality if you want it.

download_iconReset transform (improved) installer

Zero Transform

But that’s not all!  I have another even cooler extension for you today!

One of the functions that I sorely missed for years in Flash was Zero Transform.  That’s a function that takes the current state of a symbol instance and makes it the zero point in the transform.  That is, after zeroing a transform, your selected symbol won’t have changed in appearance but its transform will now be 100% scale with 0 rotation and skew. Any 3d animation program worth its salt has this functionality, so why doesn’t Flash?

It took some doing, but I managed to write a Zero Transform command for Flash.  I use it all the time, and I think you may find it useful too.

Included are two commands: Zero transform as is and Zero transform at scale. The first is exactly as I described above, and the one I find most useful.  The second does something very similar, except that instead of resetting the transform so that it ends up at 100% scale, it does it so that it ends up an arbitrary X and Y scales that you specify.

I use Zero transform as is enough that I have it bound to an easy-to-remember keyboard shortcut: ctrl-alt-Z. I think of it as a more authoritative version of ctrl-shift-Z.

download_iconZero Transform installer

Sep 28 2011
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I Must Destroy You, UCLA

I Must Destroy You

Students in their first year at the UCLA Animation Workshop create a short film. When I was there the only thing we were allowed to use a computer for was to master the sound. I followed that rule. Pretty much.

The rule was there because at some point in the 1990s, as computers became more more helpful in amateur filmmaking, some of the students in the workshop took advantage of those digital tools a little too much.  It got to the point where some of them were just phoning in their work, turning in films that were, at best, of questionable merit. So the professors of the workshop decided that it would be appropriate to require all first-years to work completely traditionally, with no help from a computer.  That would keep them from using the too-easy shortcuts that computers provided.

Not exactly the solution I would have arrived at, but that’s a debate for another time and place.  Really it’s a moot point now, since the rule has all but disappeared.  Thankfully, first-year students are now allowed to use computers, now simply held accountable for the quality of their films.

Anyway, this is all to preface the presentation of my first-year film.  This is it, animated the old-fashioned way, on cels with brushed lines and painted fills. I added digital energy sword effects after finishing it for school, but other than that it’s full-on old-school.  I hope you enjoy it.

Sep 24 2011
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Animation, Cats In Space, Falling Lizard

I Can’t Do Anything Half-Assed

I’m only speaking slightly hyperbolically when I say that I can’t do anything half-assed. I always feel that if I’m going to do something that’ll be a lot of work, I might as well do it right. Take, for example, animation.

It can be frustrating to have that attitude sometimes. It means I do a lot less stuff.  It would be great to be able to just jump in and start animating something, but I think I’d end up with a bad result if I did that.  Why make it if it ends up being so bad that no one will want to watch it?

In the case of animation, story is vitally important.  That’s the real stopping point.  I have to sit down and make a good story to animate, otherwise it’s not worth creating the animation.

I’m thinking about this in relation to my Cats in Space series idea.  I made a very short animation based on that recently.  If you haven’t seen it yet, take a look:

I did that video in a super-rough style for the sake of getting it done fast.  I got an interesting comment on the Youtube page for that video, suggesting that if I did an episode like that once every two months and gave it some higher production value then I might actually be able to get some people following my Youtube channel.  That’s a pretty exciting thought to me.  I love the idea of people who I don’t know actually being interested in the stuff I make.

How hard would it be to do something like that?  Well, that’s where we get back to the basic premise of this post.  If I were to do a series then I’d want it to have a good overarching story.  Serialization, that is.  I should be able to string it together and have it be coherent as a whole presentation.  You know, because it should be something that new viewers can go back and watch sequentially and get the whole story.

To have a good story there has to be some planning.  You can’t just jump in because that’ll create a mess of a story.  You get more short-term gratification but in the long term you get a bit of a shoddy product.

For the last few days I’ve been messing around in Word, working on story ideas.  It’s hard.  There are good specific steps you can take to make a good story but you still have to have some creativity.  Maybe that’s obvious, but it’s something I need to remind myself of.  I need to come up with something good to make it engaging.

So yeah, that’s what I’m working on.  I’m excited to make it happen.  I guess we’ll see where it goes from here.

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