Animation and Video Life

USA Presidential election campaign speeches are so much more interesting and inspiring than the election campaign speeches given by Australian politicians. Personalities play a big part in deciding US elections (as does the Supreme Court for the cynical among you). I enjoy listening to campaign speeches in the US elections and Mitt Romney's speech at the 2012 Republican convention was a doozie. The video of his entire speech is embeded below but it was his closing comments from about 30 minutes into the speech onward that really caught my attention. Mitt talks about the threat in Iran and notes that Obama's diplomatic talks with Iran have achieved nothing. He reinforces the idea of a United America and highlights the many soldiers that have died fighting for the values and freedoms that America enjoys. Which got a big cheer. I wonder if anyone who'd actually lost someone in the Afghanistan or Iraq conflicts were cheering? Do those people feel any more free now for ...

Alvin the Owl is a character that I originally designed for a business client as one of a selection of owl choices. This version didn't make the cut but I liked him so much I decided to animate him anyway. Eventually I'll release him as a community character on GoAnimate. In creating Alvin I thought I'd show you how the character is constructed in Koolmoves. In particular how I made use of an embeded movie clip inside the main character movie clip to isolate the head animation from the rest of the body. The embeded video below is a tour of Alvin's Koolmoves file for his 'standing' and 'stand and talk to camera' actions. It doesn't explain how the character was made (see some of my previous Koolmoves tutorials for that). If you're at this level of creating characters you should be able to work out for yourself how to embed a movie clip within a movie clip. At the time of writing this blog post this is all that I've done in the wa...

I've been on an extended break from this blog (and pretty much everything I do in the way of creating my own new content) not by choice but because I've been very busy in my Animation Business . I'm certainly not complaining about that but, for me at least, there does come a point in creating animations for clients where all my energy has to go into getting the best result for my client - even if it means cutting back on everything else I do. Fortunately the work has eased up a little and I feel I can get back into, what I hope will be, regular weekly posts to this blog again. I thought I'd begin with a post about what's coming up that I would like to blog about as well as an update on projects I started but have yet to complete. Firstly, all the paid work has allowed me to purchase quite a few software packages that I'm sure readers of this blog would like me to review including: Serif DrawPlus X5 - Vector drawing and animation. Serif MoviePlus X6 - Vid...