Move Move Move!

A few weeks ago I found myself having lunch with my two good friends, Jeff Lafferty and Ken Truhan. Both are amazing artists and have pushed themselves into the realm of animation (Ken with traditional style 2D Flash animation and Jeff with his new stop motion puppet animation.)

So, it got me thinking and asking a few questions.

I've always had in the back of my mind to do some sort of animated OilCan Drive piece where I can blend the art and music of the project into some sort of video. Talking to these two just brought all of those thoughts back into the fore front of my mind.

So, after lunch I ran home and started playing a bit with what I had to see what I could do.

Initially I tried something Jeff suggested because I told him I had been having trouble figuring the Flash program out. He suggested I simply make the frames individually in Photoshop and then put them all back together using something as simple as Windows Movie Maker. It seemed to work OK but it was hard to envision how the piece would turn out when I was simply moving the pieces a little at a time in each frame. I simply don't have the knowledge or experience yet to know, "if I do this, it will look like this when I am finished."

But, a few jagged moments aside (I think I miscounted when I was moving a few of the elements around while creating the frames) it came out OK.



Then, I switched into the Flash program and figured out how to make it work like I wanted it to work. For any of you out there who even have the most basic knowledge of Flash this will look like first day teaching stuff. But, it's moving, and I think it has some promise.



So, it's not much, but it's a start and it has the wheels in my head spinning.

But, for now, back to the three client jobs I am juggling. Hopefully if I can wrap them all up I can jump back to the world of OilCan Drive sooner than later.