Keyframer

Great interview by Carleen Hawn if you are a fan of Brad Bird. Gigaom examines Birds’ methods of getting the most out of his artistic teams.

No, this is not a Marvel character that Ironman must battle to save the planet, but it’s just as cool if you are a Flash designer. My friends over at New Pixel have developed yet another wicked-awesome extension for Flash appropriately named: Particulator. These guys are the brilliant developers who gave us the iK’ motion component that I blogged about way back when.

The particulator is easy to use and provides instant feedback with its simple slider controls. I’m having a lot of fun creating and simulating wind, fire and smoke while integrating these awesome effects into other animations. The coolest part about this component is, these effects are super slick and they would take me ages to create them as timeline-based effects. Even if I could, I don’t think they would look as good. I will post some sample animations soon but I highly recommend checking this component out and adding it to your Flash arsenal folks!

Dell is a huge corporation here in America and that badge often comes with a price in the eyes of the general consumer. The term “Corporate America” can imply a cold and unfriendly conglomerate whose only goal is to make money at the expense of consumer relations. Dell has proven itself to be the total opposite of that. more »

I am a believer. As I have stated in my previous post, I will never buy a pre-built PC ever again! “dzedward” recommended I build my own - so I did. I don’t have time to describe the difference in performance right now because i am too busy jumping up and down with joy (geek on parade). So here’s a few pics in the meantime.

Just an “I’m still here” entry in case any of you were wondering…were you? The past several weeks have been sort of a transitional period for me. After almost 7 years as a fulltime freelancer, I have accepted an offer I couldn’t refuse. I am Art & Animation Director for Say We All Games (SWAG),  formerly Say Design. I met John Say (founder) many moons ago when we both were speaking at the Flash Forward Conference in San Francisco (2003?). Soon after he hired me to design and animate a couple of game. for Nickelodeon and just recently asked me to come aboard fulltime. What’s even better is that I still work remotely (from home) and can also keep the Mudbubble name going on the side. So I continue to freelance but provide full focus on game design and animation.

Throw in the first signs of warm weather and the crack of baseball bats, and suddenly blogging takes a seat in the back row of life.

This has been the $64,000 question ever since the iphone was released. It’s just a matter of time and this article provides a little inside hope that we might be getting very close to a reality when it comes to the iphone supporting Flash. My question is, why has it taken this long?

This is a fully “rigged” character made with Flash. it will be used for an original animation as well as an example for the 2nd edition of How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS3.

Some of you may not have been aware that the word on the street lately has been that the FlashForward Conference was dead - meaning its owner Lynda Weinman wasn’t going to support it any longer. That really bummed me out as it has been my favorite conference since the very beginning. Luckily that rumour was only 1/2 true. Go here to read more.

I got to work with some talented peeps over at Moroch for their client, the McDonalds corporation, to design a fun interactive Flash game called Shark Bait ll. The game is a promotion for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Huge kudos to Joe Corrao for helping with the shark design.

Online Training Library® Exclusive!

Animation Tips and Tricks is a recording of the live presentation given by your truly at the Flashforward 2007 conference in Boston. Please note that since this presentation was recorded live, the audio and video quality may vary from our regular course offerings. So if you missed this great conference, you can still benefit from some of the content via lynda.

I have to say, this is application is quite fun - especially if you have kids with or without artistic ability

The biggest mobile device trade show on Earth is taking place in Barcelona next week and Adobe will be there showing off some cool Flash Lite technology. I had the honor of helping Adobe and Nick develop some of the featured Flash Lite demos (pictured above) which has me very excited about the future of mobile content authoring.