World Domination Made Easy

The Uchukira Corporation is proud to announce that How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device has won first prize in the animation category at the Take 5 Film Festival!

Here are some production notes if you're into that kind of thing.

How to Assemble Your New Doomsday Device

Congratulations on your new Uchukira™ Doomsday Device! Here's a handy video on how to easily and quickly assemble the most reliable planet killer on the market today. Brought to you by the Uchukira Corporation.

Uchukira: World Domination Made Easy™

This is a project that I've been working on for the last few days. The student film festival from last year is coming up again, and I managed to find out about it a whole week in advance this time!

I decided to do the animation in PowerPoint again, because I'm still pretty familiar with the software and I don't animate enough to buy any actual animation software. Here's a slide from the original PowerPoint and another excellent case study of why PowerPoint is not made for animation.

The film festival is on April 4th, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Wish me luck!

Shoot the Zombie

 

This is a quick, silent animation I threw together in an hour. I had a whole storyboard put together, and I've since recorded some voice bits. I might put together the full thing yet, but in the meantime feel free to watch this version and learn the joke ahead of time so that the official release holds no meaning to you whatsoever.

Janice Did Not Die in Vain

It's official! Last night at the film festival, Paradium and You won 1st Place in the Animation category and the overall People's Choice prize!

I wasn't able to make it to the screening until about an hour in, so I missed the third- and second-place winners in animation. I went in not knowing if I had received a previous prize or if I had even been considered for the category. Seeing my name and the title of my animation up on the screen was an absolute shock, and I'm still sort of riding that phenomenal buzz today.

This is really exciting. I was honestly not expecting to win - not for lack of trying, but for lack of time. As I've previously mentioned, I found out about the festival three days before the deadline and I was using probably the worst possible program for the job.

However it happened, I won, and I'm pretty darn stoked about that.

Just so this whole thing isn't text (or at least type), here're the production notes. I think it's kind of cool to see what certain bits look like in relation to the finished product, so if you're into that too, here's my brainstorm process. If you're not really into that, there are some doodles of Janice in there too. Your boat floats in a manner known only to you.

And yes, I am aware that my handwriting is a masterpiece of typography. Please stop flooding the comments with your praise.

Paradium and You - The Citizen Guide to Safety

A short public service announcement on the dangers of paradium. Three days from start to finish, then another two days to make it not look like garbage. Or look more like garbage. I distorted it a bunch to make it look sixty years old, so I'm not sure if that's really an improvement.

But yeah, here.

Vector Drawing with PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 is not the best tool for vector illustration. It's a presentation program, and that's what it's intended for. However, the surprising thing is that it's passably good at both. It can export to .pdf, .png, .gif, .jgp, and as I recently learned, to video formats like .wmv.

PowerPoint has many of the features of more powerful vector editors like Adobe Illustrator, the problem is that they're pretty well hidden. You want a pen tool? Home > Drawing > Autoshape Panel > Curve. It's right under the text boxes and block arrows that people use for creating normal presentations.

The Illustrator Pencil tool is in the same panel in PowerPoint, but it's called Scribble. I get the feeling that some of these drawing tools arose by accident. For example, there's a tool that lets you draw straight lines connected by corner points when you click the screen, but turns into something like the scribble tool when you click and hold. I can't imagine the application for that in an illustration, but it makes sense if you're trying to connect two unusually placed points of data in a presentation.

And once you've drawn a shape, the editing tools available are incredible. You can edit anchor points, arrange the shape order, select grouping options, and just look at the shape format menu.

Every conveivable effect you could think to apply is in that left bar, and they're actually pretty well fleshed out in terms of variability. It even has raster editing options (Everything in the left bar from Picture Corrections down to Crop).

And because everything is drawn in vector, any necessary touch-ups can be done in other programs. You can save your design as a .pdf in PowerPoint and open it in Illustrator. Or, most surprising to me, you can just copy your selection from PowerPoint and paste right into a waiting artboard in Illustrator.

Where PowerPoint differs from drawing programs like Illustrator is its focus on presentations. In some areas, this causes drawbacks. There are no blob brush tools or pathfinder selections. Pattern fills are very limited, and text cannot be converted to shapes. However, because it's a presentation software, it brings with it something new: a library of animation effects and an audio recorder.

Here's a short thing I made to test the animation abilities of PowerPoint.

It's sloppy, but it gets the point across. In addition to regular movement paths, a number of slide transition animations can be applied to shapes. And all of it can be edited on a functional and precise timeline. Here's the timeline from the above animation.

I only recently started using the Adobe suite as part of my schoolwork, and I'm amazed at some of the capabilities of those programs. There is no doubt in my mind that Illustrator is better for professional design than PowerPoint. But as a veteran PowerPointer, there are some features I've grown used to that I feel are missing in Illustrator. Namely, the Format Painter and enclosed selections.

The Format painter is a tool in PowerPoint that lets you highlight an object and transfer all its format to a new shape. For example, let's say you have a rectangle with a 6-point dashed gradient line, two directions of drop shadow, and a 16° diagonal 3D rotation and you want all that on a circle. Just click the rectangle, click the Format Painter, and click the circle. Done. Maybe I've overlooked something, but I have yet to find that feature in Illustrator. The closest I can find is the Eyedropper tool, but so far as I can tell it only applies the fill color.

Enclosed selections were probably the biggest shock to my system. In PowerPoint, if you want a bunch of shapes selected at once, you drag the selection box to surround the shapes. This lets you select details within a large object.

Here's the selection process in PowerPoint:

And here it is in Illustrator:

Illustrator doesn't have an option to select only the shapes enclosed. Instead, everything the selection box touches is selected. So in this particular instance, instead of clicking and dragging once to make my selection, I would have to shift click nine times to select only the circles (or just deselect the rectangle, but that isn't always feasible). It's annoying, is all. Especially on projects with a higher amount of detail. Something on this sort of scale, for example.

If I want to do a quick, simple project, most times I'll still go to PowerPoint, just because it's an environment I'm more familiar with. The title banner of this site was made in PowerPoint. I'm sure that over time I'll become more accustomed to the Adobe suite. I sure hope I'll become more accustomed to it. That is one of the things I'm looking to get out of my Intro to Illustrator class, anyway.

That's all for today, folks! Tune in next week for another exciting look at the world of drawing programs, where we'll take a look at how Microsoft Paint is totally comparable to Adobe PhotoShop! (We won't and it isn't.)

See you then!

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

POWERPOINT CAN EXPORT TO VIDEO

Why did nobody tell me about this!? I've known about timing and narration recordings for a while, but I never used them much because they still required the viewer to open it in PowerPoint. But just File > Save & Send > Create a Video and bam. It's a .wmv file. Playable in darn near any and every video player known to man.

Here's a presentation on calcium I did in culinary school. It's an old educational film stylistically based on the brilliant parody series Look Around You, which itself is stylistically based on old educational films. And it's on YouTube. Because that's a thing I can do now.

I've used PowerPoint forever. I ran a t-shirt design business for two years off nothing but vector designs made in PowerPoint 2007. It is mind-blowing to me that I'm only just now learning this.

Malicious Medical Music!

This song's a work in progress. The version below is not a capella by choice. The album art was drawn by me because videos need visuals. I hope to add an instrumental as soon as I learn how to instrument.

Lyrics:

Burn the world in effigy and tell me what you find
Sifting through the ashes of humanity's dark mind
Hoard the horrid pieces, because I think there just might
Be a noble use for them if we can store 'em right

Bottle up
All the hate, all the fear
All the malice, all the tears
Cook 'em up, boil 'em down
Bottle death
And disease, and whatever else you please.
And we'll formulate the cruelest cure around.

Spider eyes and vicious lies; the poisons that we brew
Tools for cutting down to size wretches like me and you.
Lob those vials overhand into the lion's den.
Let them get a good hard dose of their own medicine.

Bottle up
All the greed, all the crime
All the damages of time
Cook 'em up, boil 'em down
Bottle war
Bottle woe, we will reap before they sow.
We're the merchants of the cruelest cure around.

Run through cool dry places, keeping far out of the light.
Kill nagging suspicions that we're fighting the wrong fight.
Prescribe lethal doses to the voice of common sense
Take a gulp and glimpse the death of all our innocence.

Bottle up
All the pain, all the loss
Take it all at any cost.
Cook 'em up, boil 'em down
Bottle wrong
Bottle right, because right's become a blight.
On the history of the only cure around.