The Monkey and The Monk

This is a loose experiment with the ultimate goal of learning Flash as an animation tool. Our plan is to produce a short for the purpose of creating unpredictable circumstances to help learn, develop and possibly create practical techniques. Crazy like a monkey and focused like a monk. This is our blog of notes and work. All critiques and contructive criticism are welcome.

Saturday, August 26, 2006

A great site for Traditional Animation....

Lots of tips abound here. I still haven't gotten through the whole thing!

http://handdrawnnomadzone.blogspot.com/

Wednesday, August 16, 2006

The Ministry of Silly Walks....

I was inspired by Pascal...so I think I'm going to try to do a few of these each day. They take me less than a half hour to crank out and they're fun!

Sad walk

GumDrop

Saturday, August 12, 2006

ultrashock.com

www.ultrashock.com

Look under tutorials. THere's some interesting tuts on cell shading in flash...might be useful for coloring later ;)

I finished tying na inbetweening test with Mark's file. Overall it wasn't so bad. Flowing things like hair and the tail was problematic. I did do most of it keyframed and tried to use as little to none of Mark's drawn part. Just experimenting to see how much I could get away with minimally...

Mark, I can't save the file out as quicktime. can you post it here for me?

Here's another great site of Flash/Animation/Illustration designers...

http://www.ghostbot.com/

Graham's Kera Crawl

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Some sketches for ideas...

While Mark's spending all his time making shings move, I took a bit of time to come up with some story ideas....










Here's some random ideas on how the monkey could distract the Monk...all ideas welcome ;)






And now...a crazy damn monkey....

Monday, August 07, 2006

Stories about Monkies and Monks....

There's a lot of material out there. The Monkey was very prominent in asian mythology. I don't see the short going the way of fantasy, but it always pays to do research for ideas!

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/204340.ctl

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Awesome Glenn Keane Drawings...

Glenn Keane is awesome...here's some drawings by him...'nuff said...

http://theartofglenkeane.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

The John K. Show...

Myself, Mark and our friend Hanna went to the John K. show in San Francisco last Saturday. I was really impressed with the way Flash was utilized in his projects, especially the new video he did for Weird Al.

Link

He said it was "a new way of doing Flash". TO me, it just looks like he drew out every pose...just like in traditional 2d. I see some tweening here and there, but mostly it's pretty fluid. I'd really like for the project to look like this...but it's important to test the possibilities first. After all, Fosters looks nothing like this and it's pretty damn cool.

Here's some more cool flash links:

http://www.coldhardflash.com/
http://flashfilmmaker.com/forums/index.php
http://www.biteycastle.com/