Animation and Video Life

One of the ideal uses for a website like GoAnimate is creating animations based upon comments, feedback and conversations online. The kind of thing you just wouldn't sit down and spend months animating - well, maybe, if you're from Ardman Animations  scouting for a new season of Creature Comforts  you might - but for the rest of us... probably not. However, just for a bit of fun with your friends or simply for your own amusement, animating an online discussion or comment is one of the things GoAnimate can do well without taking months away from more important animation projects. Here's a recent GoAnimatation I did of an email reply I received about my post, Harry Partridge, GoAnimate, What I Observed . I did send this person an actual email reply that, after thanking him for his comment, opened with the line written at the end of the animation. The exchange of emails did lead to a slightly more interesting and coherent discussion than is presented here but the c...

Xtranormal, Star Trek Entry Summer Movie Contest. To begin, I'd like to thank all of you that took the time to vote for and Youtube 'Like' my entries in Xtranormal's Summer Movie Contest and the Sydney Opera House's Graphic Contest . Thanks to your efforts I managed to place a very respectable seventh place in Xtranormal's contest - where the top ten most Liked entries received a prize. Seventh won me 2000 Xtranormal points - which I think equates to about US$20.00 in real money if I had to buy those points. Still, you can do a lot with 2000xp on Xtranormal so it was great to have even placed when I thought I'd be lucky to squeak in at tenth. You can see all the winners on Xtranormal's blog . GoAnimate SOH Graphic Competition Entry. I wasn't quite so fortunate with the Sydney Opera House's Graphic Contest. My entry was accepted into the first round alongside about 53 other entries. Unfortunately I don't know if I got enough...

July 1992 Edition, CU Amiga Featuring Amy the Squirrel. American Cartoonist, Eric W. Schwartz , (whose unofficial Amiga Icon, Amy the Squirrel, is pictured on the July 92 edition of CU Amiga cover on the right) is my only real animation hero. Sure there are the big names like Disney , Chuck Jones , Tex Avery and even Preston Blair whose influences can all be seen in my own cartoons but Eric did what none of the others could. He showed that really great 2D computer animation was within my reach with little more than an Amiga Computer , a copy of Deluxe Paint and Moviesetter . This was at a time when computer based animation was in its infancy (outside of computer game animation) and Flash was something that lights did. There were many great Amiga artists but Eric was really the only one consistently making very funny, traditional style animations. His humor and drawing style is heavily influenced by classic Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons but he managed to build on this, ...