A bit of a waffle on Animation

I've always liked the idea of animation, but I have to confess I don't have the patience to pull it off successfully. But digging through my old harddrive and the old chance1234.com site, I thought I would stick this post up to show my efforts.

I think one of the things, that have always put me off, is I've never found a comfortable workflow for executing my ideas. The main thing I used was macromedia flash and also tried toon boon studio.

The first "breakthrough" came when I worked out how to use motion paths in flash and this was my first effort. Frank the Robot Bin - To Binly go, where we all like to go

Click Here to play

Next up, to learn  rotation in flash, I pretty much copied a Terry Gillingham animation from The Mony Python days, adding my own bit at the end.  I bow in his greatness, as he did his version by hand and  it took me all of a weekend for my effort.  

Click Here to Play

Next up, and probably my most popular (especially with 3-5 years old so I am told) is The Gallery. I do have some further ideas for this character, but the way I created it in flash, it would involve starting to build the character from scratch again, which I have struggled to do. Lesson Learnt from this about, creating characters separate from the main timeline.

Click Here to Play

Next up,  not the most original idea, but an animation very loosely inspired by Emily Dickinson poem She went as softly as the dew. I had a very clear idea on doing the water droplet to star idea, but it took quite a few attempts to get it right technically. I didn't enjoy the process at all, and I think this is one of the reason's why I say I don't have the patience.

Click Here to Play

Next up, is the kind of animation I would like to do.  When I was a kid, I really liked the pink panther cartoon show (couldn't stand  that ant eater thing though) . I think what I liked most was the style of the backgrounds. They would be this scratchy ink style with block shading and strong contrasts.  I also used to like the pyschedelic shaking from the Rhubarb and custard cartoons.  I did the backgrounds on this, with a really shite cheap non pressure graphic pen and the character, ship and sea monster with a mouse. So technically not perfect by a long shot, but stylewise I am happy with it.  The song is "Pour Un Flirt Avec Moi" Michel Delpech. I have no idea what he is singing about, but it sounds right for the cartoon.  

 

Click Here to Play 

Finally, this is unfinished and when it gets to the corridor scene. Nothing else will happen, except the music playing. For this animation, I bought a fancy wacom tablet and tried out a few new concepts, such as having the characters turn and having objects in front of the action. This was also going to be the longest piece, with several locations and a good old fashion Mummy Chase.  The timing is off in the below, and things such as shadows are missing, and feet occasionally vanish (also the edges arent masked). But it should give you an idea.  The plan was to extend the corridor scene, introducing two new characters; The museum curator and a belly dancer  who would join in the chase, before turning the action back outside,  and giving a suitable "Deus Ex Machina" ending.

The reason, it is unfinished, is I switched from a PC to a mac, an no longer have macromedia studio and my wacom broke. If anyone wants to ahve a go at finishing it off, then please give us a shout, I will gladly send the files over. 

Click Here to Play

I am not turning my back on animation per se, more giving up on flash animation. I emailed today infact an idea to a fellow Leeds Savage Club member, about doing a very short, live action /animation short entitled "Space Cheese". I would also, like at a later date, have a go at producing some cartoon shorts, in the style that I would like to achieve.

Blogger adds Pages

Slightly under the radar, but at last you can now add static pages to Blogger. Wordpress has had the feature for years.

I've had a bit of a quick play around, and added a page listing my waffles and reviews.

Not very tidy at the moment, but it was just a play around. You can add pages, via the posting screen and there are a couple of widgets, in which you can display your pages.

How to add a Retweet button to Blogger, and My top ten posts - so far....

As you can now see, there is a shiny retweet button at the bottom of my posts. This is courtersy of Tweetmeme

I did find the instructions on their site, here, a bit crap and instead followed the instructions over here at Blogger Resources

One thing I would add, is make sure, you add <br> in edit html to the natural end of your posts, so it displays correctly. I am not going to go back and do this for all ninety posts on this blog, but I thought I would make sure, my ten most popular pages were formatted correctly.

[EDIT]
 Check the comments for some advice on how to place this in the date/comment section


Add the following line

tweetmeme_source = 'tweetmeme';

Replacing tweetmeme with your twitter username, so the posts come up @yourusername when tweeted.

Out of interest, here is the countdown to my top ten posts - handy if you are after some hang over sunday reading.

10	Leeds Victoria Hunslet Mill
9	The Bhagavad Gita
8	Mazz in Leeds New Logo
7	Round House Leeds - Anyone Chuck any light on this ?
6	Shout out to my Fellow Brit FridayFlash'rs
5	A Bit of a Waffle on Twitter Followers Part II
4	The Grammar W'nker
3	A Bit of a Waffle on Flash Fiction
2.	A bit of a Waffle on Twitter Followers Part I
1.	How to Write the How to How to

Favourite #FridayFLash from Week 34

Now listed on my Friday Flash Page; 

3 entries this week and 3 new authors added to my list - check them out

Custom Google Maps

Been editing today, and in those render times have been playing around with google maps. I've created a map for The Dead Adventurers Club which you can see by clicking here

So, if you ever wondered where Tiberius exactly bought those smugglers to justice, now you can find out.

Its not the most fluid of processes to create a custom map, if it wasn't for the fact that I have had all these windows when waiting for rendering to complete, then I wouldn't of bothered.  There are a couple of glitches with size and images for starters.

You can also see the map here where you can subscribe to the URL feed for it  and also open it up in google earth. 

MYSQL and PHP, how do I show a random group of records where count >1

I've just added to my favourite #fridayflash list , a featured Author selection. Where I have been adding stories each week, there are naturally several authors appearing more than once. What I wanted to do, was feature one of these author on the page, by random selection, and list their stories.

I apologies if the language might seem a bit funny in this post, but from trying to do it, it was not what I quite expected and took a bit of googling. I am typing this post this way, in the hope someone with the same problem finds it easy on google.

Firstly my data is stored in the following table structure.


CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `fridayflash` (
  `sID` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `week` int(11) NOT NULL,
  `sortA` varchar(1) NOT NULL,
  `title` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `author` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `twitter` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `link` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `review` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `notes` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`sID`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM  DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=45 ;

The first thing I needed to was find out all of those authors who had more than one entry in the database. My SQL looked liked the following *

SELECT author
FROM fridayflash
GROUP BY author
HAVING COUNT( sID ) >1


The next thing, was to limit by select one of these records by random. To achieve this, I added the following two lines to the bottom of the query. 


SELECT author
FROM fridayflash
GROUP BY author
HAVING COUNT( sID ) >1
ORDER BY RAND( )
LIMIT 1


I now then wanted to select all the stories by my random selection and this is where I began to run into problems.  Firstly approaching this as if i was using Oracle of SQL Server and using nested queries, HAVING or WHERE. I ran into the error

'This version of MySQL doesn't yet support 'LIMIT & IN/ALL/ANY/SOME subquery'


I found my solution here on this article on sub queries  and got the required result, by using the following SQL

SELECT *
FROM fridayflash
INNER JOIN (

SELECT author AS b
FROM fridayflash
GROUP BY author
HAVING COUNT( sID ) >1
ORDER BY RAND( )
LIMIT 1

) AS c ON fridayflash.author = c.b



I then created the following PHP Function **
function FeaturedAuthor()
{
$counter = 1;

$sql = &quot;SELECT * FROM fridayflash
INNER JOIN (
SELECT author AS b
FROM fridayflash
GROUP BY author
HAVING COUNT( sID ) &gt;1
ORDER BY RAND( )
LIMIT 1) AS c
ON fridayflash.author = c.b&quot;;

$result = mysql_query($sql)
or die(mysql_error());

if (mysql_num_rows($result) == 0)
{
echo &quot;&lt;em&gt;No created.&lt;/em&gt;&quot;;
} else {


while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
If ($counter == 1)
{
echo &quot;&lt;h1&gt;&quot; .&quot;&lt;a href=http://twitter.com/&quot; . $row['twitter'] .&quot;&gt;&quot;. $row['author'] . &quot; &lt;a&gt;&quot; .&quot;&lt;/h1&gt;&quot;;
}

echo &quot;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot; . $row['link'] . &quot;&gt;&quot; . $row['title'] .&quot;&lt;/a&gt; &quot; .
$row['review'] . &quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;/p&gt;&quot;;

$counter = $counter ++;
}
}


}




And you can see the result on the #fridayflash list page of my site, just under the Most Recent stories added. If you hit F5 you will see the featured author change.

*Yes, I know using author name is not an ideal key :-p, let me tell you sometime of a horror story involving a developer being allowed free roam on the company servers without any DBA's to distract you.
** I'm very slowly learning php, I am not happy with the use of the counter in the above to make sure the author name is only outputted once.  Suggestions ? 

Some Favourite #Fridayflash from Week 32

I've just updated my fridayflash page with my favourites from this week. I did get a bit behind over the xmas period, so listed below are the last ten entries I've added. All of these stories are worth a read and I whole heartily recommend all of them.


First Foot By Sam A velvet smooth MC in this tale with a bite
iSurgeon By G.P. Ching Lets hope this is not coming to an app store soon.
A Nightmare to Remember By Karen Schindler Wonderful build up and great humour
A Neccessary Getaway By John Wiswell The origins of Santa...
The Antigravity Flymabob By Eric J. Krause Great fun in this xmas tale
Honour Among Thieves By Michael J. Solender Two brothers, one Haul
Mother Dove By David G Shrock Clunk clunk, clunkety clump!
The GS Virus By Andrew Rosenberg An infectious read...
No Man's Land By Ganymeder becareful of what you write , for tommorow....
The Appearance By Chad Redden Wonderful bizarre and surprisingly so true

Bit of a waffle on flash fiction

I  posted this morning on the #fridayflash fiction part of my site my favorites from this week.  I've been thinking about what makes, in my mind a good piece of flash fiction.

I would like to stress the following before diving into this waffle; a lot of what I am saying here is about my own personal taste and it should be read as such. Who am I ? Just some Joe who also churns out some flash fiction at the DAC

I am not a fan of science fiction, so it is rare that I will read a sci-fi piece, however If I read an opening sentence that grabs us, regardless of genre I am more likely to read it through to the end and I think that is where some flash authors fall down. You have such a short space to fit the entire story in and that opening is so important.

A couple of examples of good openings from this weeks #FridayFlash round:

"Joel and Elijah knew they were in trouble even before they left for the bathroom."

This comes from John Wiswell story "The Balrog Looms"

From that we know the characters, we know the premise and we know the location.  I am now hooked in and want to know who these people are, why they think they are in trouble and what is going to happen

Another good example, this time from Shannon Esposito and her tale Messenger of Death

"Eric fumbled with the buttons on the arm rest of the stolen Nissan. A blast of humid night air hit him. It smelled like charred beef."

I used to drive an old battered and much loved 1992 Peugeot 405 and switching on the blowers would blast several years of dirt and breaking down plastic into the car, which on a hot night produced one hell of a smell. Reading this opening, I've got the atmosphere in my head, I know who the protagonist is and I have a hook into the story that the car is stolen.

Going back to where I think some authors fall down, is they try and cram too much irrelevant description into that opening

"The desk was made of dark wood with  a green leather surface with gold trim" - great!  a story about a desk.

I think if we all step back and be honest, flash fiction is not the platform for great original stories.  Effectively they are all " then he woke up and it was all a dream " or " and it turned out the person he was sitting next to was a ghost". BUT!!!! it is the place for original storytelling and what I think makes a good piece of flash fiction is the authors ability to steer the reader through the tale, keep them entertained and keep them interested to the end; Whether it be through misdirection, blanketing or just plain out lying!

A good example about steering the reader and misdirection can be found in this flash from Karen Schindler  "What a way to go" 

One of the other mistakes I think people make is concentrating too much on elements and detail which are not needed in the piece, rather than putting that focus into what we are all here for -  storytelling. To play devils advocate for a second , I do think some stories need more detail and I think they would of had been far better off as longer pieces rather than flash. Which is a shame as normally these stories, the author has had a cracking idea, but has lost it by trying to cram it into flash length. I've pulled my return to Break Creek as a potential fridayflash for this very reason (posting this short very soon btw).  There are very few authors who can cram entire worlds into a thousand worlds of less , Mazzz In Leeds is a fine example of an author who can.

Next up comes the ending and in all honesty, I think examples of bad endings are few and far between. There are sometimes disappointing endings  "It wasn't a ghost, but rather he suffered from a rare translucent skin condition" and I think this goes back to my previous points. If you don't grab the reader in that first second, you don't keep them entertained and you haven't focused on the art of storytelling; then it doesnt really matter if you have the greatest ending or the worst ending - your reader simply won't care.

A fine example of this week , which I think nicely demonstrates all three points I have made is 
The Mystery Writer Returns By Tim Vansant and an author that never disappoints in this regard is Laura Eno
So coming to the end of my waffle, there is just one final thing I would like to say which will sound familiar to those who have ever pursued artistic or photographic interests:

"First rule of composition is to break the rules of composition"

PS. Evil cats is always a winning subject.

Another quick tidy up on My #fridayflash page

I have been editing a friends wedding video recently, so have not had much time to continue with learning php and messing around with chance1234.com

However, I have done a very quick tidy up on the fridayflash page which lists my favourite reads. Nothing drastic, just shifted the last ten and archive lists from out of the two columns and moved them below.

I may introduce some sorting and filtering of the archive when it gets bigger; I am, however curious in what I can do to treat the data more "equal" and what I mean by equal is a story from say week 22 should be as prevalent as a story from week 36.

I have the random selection in the corner, and by the nature of listing them alphabetically they are getting mixed up, but I believe there are more tricks out there. One of the faults I see with blogs is that information gets too easily buried and quite a few things I'm trying out on chance1234.com is ways of getting on a more even footing - hence the random order on the front page.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

I've just added a link from the front page to my interpretation of this poem in a flash animation which you can view here

#FlashFriday Update

Had a bit of a tidy up on my #fridayflash page on chance1234.com

Firstly I had all the SQL for the queries on the page, I took them out and placed them in a separate php file and organised them into functions. This has had a noticeable improvement on the speed of loading up the page.

I also added some <hr> tags to make the different sections a bit clearer.

I am a bit stuck on what my next move will be for this page; a couple of thoughts

1) I want to make the random selection, more prominent
2) I need a way of organizing the archive, whilst treating all entries equal !

3 New items to the front page

My Fotki Pages

I have had an account since 2001 and I think fotki is one of the best services out on the internet for photo sharing, however I do think its approaching the time where it needs a bit of an overhaul - with user input.

Youtube Channel

A few videos that of which some used to be listed in the blog postings of the old chance1234.com site. Most recent was a timelapse video I shot when I was driving in Vancouver in a Mustang.

The Vault
One of the old pages from the original site, I quite like the spinnign carousel and I pictured having lots of items on this. I think one of the problems of the internet, is too much stuff gets buried and I think this was a novel way of showing content. I might reuse that for something else in the future. What I do not know.