Anime DreamsFlash animations, Photoshop tricks, cartooning, and graphics fun

Simple Is Often Better - Giant Cow (Video)

Ed Beals keeps his Flash animations simple and direct, yet manages to pack them full of meaning and impact. No words, just simple images telling a brief story with background music that's composed primarily of music loops. Yet, Beals' animations are extremely powerful and will stick in your memory for a long, long time.

Urban Surf Kings - Giant Cow - More bloopers are a click away

Simple Flash Anime can often be a better fit

We usually try way too hard to come up with impressive Flash. We spend hours trying to orchestrate really complex movements, and generally end up tearing our hair out just to come up with a cartoon or anime that will WOW the customer, or our friends and family.

Cartooning and Anime - Finding Inspiration Everywhere

As I touched on in my previous post, one of the most difficult challenges for an illustrator or animator is finding inspiration. You know you want to create a new cartoon, illustration, or anime, yet that blank screen or blank piece of paper keeps staring you in the face daring you to try. Yet for a few lucky artists it doesn’t seem to be a problem at all. Why? What’s their big secret?

Creating A Flash Cartoon Animation - Where To Start

Almost all of the cartoonists, manga-ka and comic strip artists started off by drawing characters from other sources. Developing your own style and unique characters takes time, and lots of it. If you do a Google search and track down the very first Peanuts comic strip you will be surprised at how simple and almost primative Charlie Brown, Snoopy, and the rest of the Peanuts gang appears.

Juxtaposition - Adding Audio Clips to Your Website

I really wanted to add audio to my blogs, and needed a solution that would work across most, if not all, browsers. Flash was the natural choice since it seems to provide cross browser compatability, and Swishmax was the easiest way to cobble together a quick test.

A Simple GIF Animation

Clickable Advertising Banner Flash

May 31, 2005
Software: SwishMax
Ref: http://www.tokyorent.com

This is a simple banner I put together for a property management company here in Tokyo. They specialize in rental apartments for foreigners including English language teachers and IT professionals.

As usual, the design took a lot longer than the implementation. The Flash design was done using SwishMax. The text, including the Japanese kanji characters were converted into shapes – primarly because of concerns that viewers of the ad might not have the same character fonts installed on their systems. The total file size is slightly over 20k.  

New Years Card - Simulating Brush Strokes

Animation is the second cousin to magic. Your animation doesn't actually have to be perfect, it only has to look close enough to the real thing so that people "get the idea".

Laser Light Show

Title: Laser Light Show
Tools Used: Swishmax
Length: Continous
Audio: None
Download Size: 8k
Format: Flash SWF
Notes: Laser simulation in Flash

False Motion - Color

Title: False Motion - Color
Tools Used: Swishmax
Length: Continous
Audio: None
Download Size: 12k
Format: Flash SWF
Notes: This image is composed of four foods - some lettuce, a tomato, a banana, and some meat. These were constructed for a health and weight loss program. As the background color varies it appears as if the size of the vegetables changes noticeably inspite of the fact that their size is actually constant. The only effect applied to this image is the color cycling of the background.