Thursday, February 14, 2008

New Cartoon by me!


I think if you click on the image it will take you to the cartoon- testing now-
Here's a text link too.

Yesterday's link was impossible for just about everyone except Linda Davick and Fearless Freep.
I created the cartoon in Flash, then took it into After Effects to put it all together, output it as a Quicktime movie and then despaired when it was 613 mbs.

But I took it back into Flash to make a Flash video, which doesn't look as pretty, but it did the trick size wise.

Although I'm one of the people who believes copyright law is just about null, please don't post this to youtube or share it too much as it might affect my chances of selling it, and I'd really like to keep this thing working.

Let me know anything that you don't like or doesn't make sense. As usual it goes by awfully fast, but if you can read you can follow along!

10 comments:

Mars Tokyo said...

I'd love to see it, but when I go to the site it says I don't have permission to download the file. There's no place where I can put in a password. :-(

Sally said...

Bummer! I'm just leaving for the airport to pickup, but when I return I'll double check. I set the password last night. I can't check easily, cause it lets me right in. But I'll fire up the laptop. I'll leave it up an extra day.

Linda Davick said...

I'm still smiling and I laughed out loud in places.

I'll have more & more comments but I have to say right away that the parts I love right away are the sexual lamp (beautiful), the dancing appliances at the end, the vacuum shoes, the mean lady kicking the miserable beach ball, all the rolling eyes are too much!!! I've always loved Rebozo's voice---and I try to copy it when I'm in the bathroom or somewhere with a good echo---the My Old Pal picture frame cries out for a whole story all its own, (I need a refrigerator like that), I love how it ends, with "call me again soon." (You know, right there, at the end, it almost begins to work!) Whinsey's dancing IS pretty incredible. I love the voice of the technofart girl when it changes over to smooth. I love the drawing style best when the fat woman is trying out "every end."--what I mean is, I love the solid colors with black outlines. That style is SO STRONG and expressive. (The still shot on your blog is an example, too.) For instance, the green picture frame seems to be in another style and I think almost all the textures in the background are unnecessary. (Even in my favorite part, the firey flames behind the fat woman trying out the sexual lamp could go?) I would like it if Whinsey's line wt. didn't change. A marvel, a true marvel.

p.s. It downloaded fine for me, and it didn't even ask for a password.

Anonymous said...

I couldn't get in either.

Sally said...

Linda, you know where I got the idea for the vacuum shoes-- on your blog, thanks. I hate how the line weight changes too-- have to think how to fix that up. I know I overused the dance animation, but oh well. Gonna fix up that frame too. I've never liked the look of the frame, but like the concept, and sometimes feel my computer screen is playing the my old pal game.

You didn't like the effects behind the fat lady huh? And she needs a name. Phyllis LaPhatte? Marbles?

Linda, thanks for your extremely helpful comments.

Mars Tokyo said...

Yeaaayyyyy!!!! I got to see it. Your genius knows no bounds! that was so cool!!! I love it!! (have I used enough exclamation points???)
I THINK NOT!!!!!!!!

Jesse said...

> Phyllis LaPhatte? Marbles?
I still vote for "Mona" :)

Anyway, you know what all these computer generated voices remind me of Sally? GlaDOS from the new computer game "Portal".

Check out their trailer and lemme know what you think.

GlaDOS narrates throughout the game while you are playing. She is the master of acerbic encouragement, such as "Congratulations, <subject name here>. You must be the pride of <subject hometown here>." (sic) And she has an inordinate fondness for cake.

Sally said...

Jesse, That's a very cool trailer. I thought it was an insect at screen front for most of it.

It surprises me that text for speech voices haven't showed much change in five or six years. And still just a handful of companies in the field.

Y sources are:
at&t
cepstral

There's also a company called nuance that bought out one of the best text to speech voices ever, Valley Girl. They've never made it available since acquiring it about six years ago.

Jesse said...

Diphone concatenation is still the most popular method, and that makes a computer voice sound a very certain way.

So much so that, you'll be surprised to hear that "Computer generated voice" from the trailer is Ellen MacClain pretending to be a computer generated voice. It's become parodiable.

As for companies, I've been using Festival which is an open source project. You can even make your own voices with Festvox. The learning curve is a bit high so it will feel a bit like installing linux.

As for the technology not pressing forward, well.. has anyone seen speech recognition recently? eww! ;)

Sally said...

Jesse, That's really interesting that Festival/Festvox is out of Edinburgh, because the company that first developed the Valley Girl voice was in Edinburgh, Rhetorical Systems.

I was impressed at the drive thru atm today when I deposited a check and it read the amount without my having to enter it.