No More Mr. Hot Stuff?

I went out to Santa Anita solo yesterday and was on fire as a handicapper. I got the pick 4 which means you pick 4 winners in a row, on an $8 bet. It CAN pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, but in my case it paid $84. That will buy a lot of oranges at the Farmers' Market in the morning. Got a lot of other bets right too.

But a horse who's drop dead gorgeous, Mr. Hot Stuff, was running yesterday, and that was actually the reason I went out there. I love this horse's looks, I admit it. He's a sleek well built truly black horse. He hasn't won a race since before the Kentucky Derby and I've bet him to win every time, including in the Derby. He didn't win yesterday either and he still looked like hot stuff. Plus he had my fave jockey, Smokin Joe Talamo on board.

But while walking Molly this morning I thought I could turn him into an internet cartoon strip character, with Whinsey, maybe for the phone. We'll see. I "worked" on it all day. Hard to get good expression on a jet black horse. And then when you're working in Flash you start thinking, gee, if this moved it would be more fun than a still comic- and take a lot longer to do. Rainy weather, sometimes I love you.

TheBoogley

An animator from Australia sent me a nice message via youtube, and I looked at all his animations on his channel TheBoogley. I really enjoyed watching them, and think he has a lovely fluid style and sense of fun and surprise. I was amazed to learn these were all done in Flash with a Wacom tablet.

He says:

I work using a wacom tablet straight into flash. I set the brush tool smoothing down to 35 which makes the line a little scraggily at times but keeps it fairly true to the movement of my hand. A few months ago I bought a wacom cintiq screen tablet, it's increased my speed by at least 10 times!

The Cintiq is the fancy Wacom tablet where you look at the screen as you draw. Now I'm thinking: I WANT ONE! This teenser laptop screen is a challenge for me.

I thought his animations were excellent, and love the look of the youtube channel too. Maybe he'll stop by here. It amazed me that they had an animation CLUB that met once a month and people would do animation just for the meeting.

On a Rainy Day

The weather here has been really wet, so we have to look for activities inside. I've read quite a few books I've enjoyed, two by favorite Scandinavian author Henning Mankell, also Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel. (The titles are impossible to remember.) Now I'm reading "Fifty Grand", by Adrian McKinty. The librarian recommended it, and it's exciting, set in a fictional Telluride. Also read "Beggars of Life" an autobiography of a hobo named Jim Tully, which sounds better than it was. For a while in the early 20th century he was very highly regarded as a writer.



I also play Pet Society on Facebook. Here's a race with three friends. I thought Skeezix would win, but Albie (my friend Jane aka prb won) Go Albie! Namowal also ran. Funny to see other Pet Society friends in the stands! But since I don't have many friends, they start repeating in bleacher groups. I'm not sure it's possible to win anything in the arena.

Namowal's "I'm So Tired"

Fellow artist Namowal has just completed her first Flash animated musical piece and it is stunning!!

It's a song I never thought about much but here it takes on a mystery and beauty-- love the way the spiral movements echo the clock's movements, the way it captures the beat and the obsessive feeling, the refined and elegant while also charming animation of the girl and the phone. I think the teapot section is my favorite. The backgrounds work well to add depth while keeping focus on what's animating.

It's not easy to use Flash tweens so smoothly and effectively and for emotional effect too. Great work, Namowal. And a brilliant ending too, with such innovation and yet feels just right.

Truly amazing that this is your first drawn animated work as it is quite masterly. I hope some new form of animation will open up so your talent can be more widely seen.

You can read more about it at her blog here.

Pet Society

Facebook has an app called "Pet Society" that is a Flash marvel. I am so enchanted with this game, maybe all the more so because I can't even start to imagine all the wondrous code coming together to make it work so smoothly.

I used to talk about terrible show horse names and had chosen "Toxic Dump" as one that you wouldn't be too likely to encounter.

And into the ring comes Sally Cruikshank riding Toxic Dump.

So I picked that as the name of my little character on the left. Now I'm stuck with it. Blog pals Namowal and Russell... are also in my neighborhood and I hope you'll join too. We dance, hug, kiss, tell jokes, and earn coins. The friend I'm with here I picked up in the cafe.

Incredible time waster but so sweet.

Playin Possum

I saw a possum playin possum today and it fooled me. It fooled Molly too. It was early in the morning at Lake Balboa. It was lying still on the ground, eyes open. It looked as if it had just been killed because its fur looked so fresh with dew from the grass on it, and its paws so pretty with the long nails .

Since we'd had a coyote encounter yesterday I just thought it was coyote breakfast, but wondered since it had no marks on it at all. What's the story here I wondered.

When I got home I realized I'd been fooled by that little opossum.

The one in the puzzle above was in our back yard a few years ago. Many people find opossums disturbing but I like their prehistoric oddness.

By the way, I learned a little more about Flash and iphones this week and thought I'd pass it on.

From one source:

"Adobe's supposedly working on it, but it's a challenge to do and do well. And Apple doesn't seem particularly anxious to see Flash on its phone..."

From another:

"The thing about the iPhone is that it can't do flash. Why? I don't know. They didn't work that out with Adobe somehow. Anything flash needs to be rebuilt in objective-c. That said, I'm sure you'd be a whiz at objective-c! You can actually download the developer's kit for free from developer.apple.com, and play... if you want to put something up for review / sale you'd have to pay the $99 developer fee."

West Side Bernie

I enjoyed this one. You may have seen it, I imagine it's one of those wildly shared videos.

goofy code

Click on the goofy white symbols. It's just an experiment from a long time ago, but kind of fun to zoom around with. If your computer screen is small it may look better bigger here.

I Phone Idea

What do you think? I got this idea in the middle of the night last night and couldn't wait to try coding it.

Let me know if you have ideas for improvement. The horses she's mentioning are really running and I'm not the one who chooses them, they're Whinsey's idea.

(All done with php and mirrors.)

Tell me if the font on top matches the one in the racing tip. I'm not finished with this, just testing to see if it seems to work. You can't chat with her-- just get your racing tip and check back tomorrow to see if she was right or not.

Think this might be one of those iphone ideas? But they still don't do Flash, do they?

On the Tunaphone

This is a Charlie the Tuna Telephone. From 1987. Why was this popular? Who wants to talk into a fish?

Last year I got fired up with the idea that cel phone animation was the coming thing. But you know what? I don't think so any more. I don't think people want to just look at their phones. They want to do things with them. Just sitting there looking at your phone seems kind of sad, doesn't it?

That's why the iphone games are taking off. That's what I think.

But I'm getting emails from art students who've decided animation is what they want to do, and they want advice. Sounds as if animation is a popular course of study on campus these days, the way marine biology was a few years ago.

I don't know what to tell them. The way the world is now, it seems like a terrible choice to me. (Have you considered entymology?) There are so few ways to make money with animation, other than teaching more students.

But sometimes a bubble of interest can be foreshadowing some new format that we can't quite identify, and maybe these students are right in front of the wave. I don't think it's just more games on phones that will be coming along, but maybe some whole new manner of interactive animation. I usually tell them to learn Flash, because it's a way in to interactive animation, even if the code language has become a bear.

Whinsey up close and personal

A friend sent me a link to a whole bunch of crazy horse hairdos this morning. This one looks a lot like my horse chatbot Whinsey, don't you think? I spent about three hours fixing Whinsey's television this morning. Whenever google image changes its code, the tv stops working. Hadn't checked it in about a year. Sometimes the image looks a bit wide, oh well.

Haven't read the logs of Whinsey's chats in about a year either. That's always a bit scary!

Hey, Mom, sell that one

That's what Molly thinks. I've been revising that little gallery to the left of this post with new art, since a couple of pieces have sold. (not on line yet.)

But this meant I had to go into my old Flash code which I haven't worked on in a long time... And this was one of the hardest things I ever coded because it was in ActionScript 3 and involved video cue points, Paypal, sound off and on, images loading, text files, you name it. And all the old fonts had taken a dive when my computer took the virus.

I didn't have much luck with my photography, because it was a sunny day and the animation cels are so glossy-- I couldn't figure a way to get the picture without streaks and reflections. But it's supposed to rain tomorrow, so maybe I'll be able to put it all together then.

It's funny when I start getting into code again-- it's very addictive, and I just don't want to take a break from it. Just want to keep going going going till it's all done. It wasn't as hard to figure out as I'd thought, but when I first looked at the code I thought, what, huh, what part of your brain ever figured this out.

Here's a function from it:

function b5go(event:MouseEvent):void
{
var myhigh:int = numChildren
removeChildAt(myhigh-1)

buzztalk="Giddy Gluey, $275.";
ummtalk=buzztalk+" "+a5;
tellus();
var image_mc:Loader = new Loader();
var pictURL:String ="bigarab.png"
var pictURLReq:URLRequest = new URLRequest(pictURL);
image_mc.load(pictURLReq);
this.addChild(image_mc);image_mc.x=370;image_mc.y=45;

}

Smiley Face Titles

The track is loud be warned.

I found the original files for "Smiley Face" on an external drive deep in the closet. This is how they look in Flash reduced to about 20% of their original size. (Guess I should have put a stop button on it too.) I'm pleased that the color looks as intended, because on the dvd it looks awful. It looks really awful. It looks so awful I could only look at it one time and then put it deep in the closet. The movie went straight to DVD. Greg Araki was very nice to work for. They wanted the timing that fast-- it wasn't my decision.

This was the last animation job I did, and it was in 2007. Mothers, don't send your kids to art school!

Testing Anita Testing

I bought a little microphone at Radio Shack and have been testing a story with it. This is a scene. You need the sound on.

Need Flash/Wacom Help

About a week ago my old Sony Vaio XP got hit with amnesia and couldn't remember where all the programs I use most were found (Flash, Photoshop, Word, Note Tab Pro.) This happened a few months ago too.

I managed to patch it all together, (no thanks to Adobe support), but in the process my Wacom tablet isn't working in Flash the way it used to. I prefer to draw with the brush, not the pencil, but in spite of adjusting every setting I can find, the drawing on the right shows what I'm experiencing: a smoothing and redraw which isn't what my hand is doing.

The drawing on the left is no beauty, but at least it's tracking my hand moves. The one on the right has stylin in mind.

Any suggestions on how to fix this? It wasn't doing the "stylin" thing before the amnesia hit.

Comcast Town! (not World)

You may have seen this appealing commercial for Comcast. I saw it on a fuzzy tv while I was in New Jersey and liked it but couldn't remember what product it was advertising. (which wouldn't please the client.) Then a friend sent me a link.

From extra info in his email I ended up at Comcast world, where they have a nifty Flash app where you construct your own room, and can give dialogue lines to all the furniture. I set mine up as a musical chairs game, with each chair saying something, as well as the squirrel phone (yes that's what it is.)

It all works really well as you move things around, but I couldn't get the sign in to work for me, am still waiting for the approval email, and by this time I'm kind of sick of the whole thing. If the sign in doesn't work it suddenly erases everything you've created. Not fun. But it's nice to see an interactive piece like this, even if it is trying to sell you something and plugs into Facebook as part of their nefarious take over the world scheme. (just kidding, but they do urge you to hook it up to Facebook and all your friends.)

Still not sure what Comcast is but I guess it's like ATT and Verizon.

Oh, and here's a link to a picture of racetrack Rosie, the breakfast cook at Santa Anita, and a nice post about her birthday.

Concentration

I returned last night from a short visit at my mother's retirement complex. This time I stayed in a guest room in the basement. ("Don't Go in the Basement.") My mother was in a wonderfully clear frame of mind, and we had many laughs and good times together. Because I was in the complex so much of the time, residents started mistaking me for an employee. "Miss, miss, I need to go to the bathroom." "Are you one of the P.T. people?"

Speaking of P.T. and O.T. (physical therapy and occupational therapy), I had to go to a session of O.T. with my mother that was not stellar. There were only two patients at the table, my mother and a woman named Biz who looked as if she might bite, and was clearly much less with it mentally than my mom. James, a young man from Seton Hall College who was training to be a therapist was conducting the session, with a legit therapist standing by. It started with a cornball "let's get to know each other" round the table we go.

Then James dealt a full deck of cards on the table sideways and face down, and told them we were playing a game, but no one was going to win, it was just for the fun of it. These two old timers then had to turn over two cards at a time to try and match red or black. You remember it I'm sure, concentration. I've always hated the game because I'm not good at it.

Even in my mother's best days she wouldn't have been any good at this game either-- it's not how her mind works. Add to that the numbers and the faces on the cards were totally distracting from the simple red/black matching. Biz was convinced she had telepathy and would stare at the back of the cards for a long spell and then consult the sky, before turning any card over.

They would have done better with my card game above. The flash file for it is here. It's from 2001. If you press the orange button it starts a new match game.

After the game was over both elderlies looked bewildered and James wanted them to share their feelings about what they'd just done, and suggest ways they might apply it to their lives. YUCK!

Bob Dylan Backstage

made me laugh.

This Just In

Gee, and just after they had that big sale on Charbucks underwear. Check your labels, pals.

Actually this is a wonderful createion from acapela tv. They also have a make it yourself cute cartoon feature which will entertain you greatly if you're the only one in the room.

I'm so happy to find this stuff. Flash provides great scripting possibilities for interactive animation, but the scripting language got so complex that people don't use it for silly stuff very often.

Drag her around

Cleaing up the hard drive, I came upon more silly interactive stuff. This one's from 2001.

Here's a link to the fla file. It doesn't come annotated though.