Complimentary Dilema Update #1

The decision to continue with Compositing has been made for me.  The outline for Compositing has 4x20% assignments and a 20% essay.   Self direction and experimentation seems impossible and the thought of another essay increases my stress levels beyond belief.

After a brief conversation with Lucien, I'm going to work on my idea under the Animation complimentary instead.  This is quite the relief.

My gripe for the day: Animated PNG's (APNG's)

Ok, so I've been looking at how my rotating jars look if I convert them to GIF format since it gets round the issue of my desire for transparency and also the Quicktime symbol loading... all fine, except that it's exceptionally grainy on the bigger images.


This led me to start researching what other options I had in the area of animated images.  Turns out there is a file format called Animated PNG's... which overcomes the issue of the 256 colours limit on GIFs...  Definitely piqued my interest...

The downside, they don't animate in Internet Explorer or Safari.  I'm not too fussed about IE but I guess it is a major issue if even Safari doesn't recognise them as animations.

So, how do you make them I hear you ask...  Well, there are various plugins and a few windows tools... too difficult a proposition to enter into and not widely supported so why bother.

Here's an example of an apng:

How awesome does it look? How good is the transparency and colour depth? Why haven't the major browsers and image editors jumped onto this one?  So annoying!

Interested in looking into them anyway?  Check them out here: http://animatedpng.com/

[UPDATE: With a bit more tweaking I managed to make the animated GIFs look OK but they're between 1.4 and 6MB, compared to 168-868KB for the QT videos... Hmmm... Bloody Hell!]

Animated Ball

Thanks to Diana for pointing this one out for me... Very exciting/cool animated GIF.

Makes me wonder whether some of my animated objects couldn't be presented in such a similar manner... ie, hovering in a virtual room... Hmmm.

The Simpsons - Inspiration city!

Was watching The Simpsons, this intro was brilliant. It in their lounge room... pans out goes into space and ends up back in their lounge room... great.



That same episode had a piece which showed Homer every day for years...



I was looking for its inspiration, these are two I found... The second one is more interesting.






Another cool Simpsons video sequence I watched tonight was the equivalent of the Evolution of Man, The Evolution of Homer:

Text-to-Video via Xtranormal

I talked about this in an earlier post... ie, the technology to type and direct animated characters to produce videos... here is an example of one... check it out. It's not the best but you get the concept.


Broccolli Man Saves The Planet

Justice - D.A.N.C.E.

I was watching MTV tonight and this video caught my attention. It would have taken a fair amount of time to produce the animation, let alone filming the t-shirts and applying it effectively especially with moderate environmental interaction. I like.

MGMT - Congratulations

Here's a video by MGMT together with their song Congratuations.

I really like the creature they're following across the sand.  On a side note, their other "official" video has a very plain video featuring a guy holding up anti-war signs... (though I did like the quote, "fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" or something similar) but it's boring in comparison to this one where the poor creature looses its bits. Sad and kinda gross really.

MGMT - Congratulations found on Pop

Skream | Listenin' To The Records On My Wall

While browsing posts I came across this one which draws on the Adam and Eve story. What is cool is that it uses various types of art forms to make up the video... what particularly took my interest, although I think it had the potential to be much better, was the use of 'Strata-cut animation'. The 'Making Of' video was very informative too... although I think the director's teeth need attention!

Check out the making of video too.



SKREAM - Listenin' To The Records On My Wall from David Wilson Creative on Vimeo.

And

Some of this, particularly at the start is perfect for what I'm going through though I'd like to keep to the single map and have the other elements be tightly controlled by the underlying map system.

3D animated transition

This is more the style I'd be after with my map animation. Although I'm obviously not intending of launching into a video sequence.

Animated Map : From Gurun Kedah To Ipoh Perak

The part I like here is the title sequence, it shows a very darkened background, this might be a way of highlighting that we don't really know what's past certain points, eg. edge of china and parts of africa in the ptolomy map. I liked the clarity of the rest of the video but would have liked to have the names of places be standing up 3D letters that projected a shadow onto the surface... I wonder whether you can have a light system that only impacts the text elements... Can you have text elements?

Map Animation Reel 2009

The cloud effects when flying over these 2D maps give an interesting effect, I think I should include such elements when I do my map. The zoom in feature at the end was also very nice.