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.

Animation with PowerPoint

PowerPoint can be used for animation. It probably shouldn't, though.

Paradium and You - The Citizen Guide to Safety came out yesterday. It was initially done as an animation entry to my local film festival and slowly, through hard work and determination, became the same thing but completed a bit too far past the deadline.

I didn't really have any place to enter a film festival. I'm an ex-culinary student who switched majors to pursue graphic design two months ago, and neither of the fragmented educations I have received thus far have prepared me for the world of competitive short film making. But I saw a poster for the festival on the day of the deadline, determined that if I could throw anything at all together in the four hours I was allotted it'd be a miracle, and decided that amateur speed cinematography sounded like a fun way to spend an afternoon. And of course, in the absence of proper animation software or common sense, I figured the fastest thing to do would be to make an animation in PowerPoint.

If I've learned one thing, it's this: PowerPoint is not appropriate software for animating.

I've previously pointed out that PowerPoint can export to video. This is a wonderful feature if you're looking to put a slideshow on YouTube. It is a terrible feature if you're trying to animate, because it lulls you into believing that if you can make a good bulleted list, you can make that list dance.

Take Janice, the only animated character in the five minute animation that can honestly be said to be animated, and that's if we're being fast and loose with our definition of honesty. Janice is on screen for a minute and forty seconds. During this time, she waves, blinks, has an x-ray look at her bones, shakes in nervous anticipation for twenty seconds, and collapses over dead. She doesn't walk around, doesn't turn her head away from the camera. This is her animation sequence in PowerPoint.

Can you understand what's going on in there? I made the thing and I can't understand what's going on in there.

The problem with animation in PowerPoint is that it doesn't support frames. Every shape from every second is in your work area at once, stacked in the order in which it will appear on screen. You can't even move things out of your way, because doing so effects how that shape will appear in the final product.

And the range of animations you can apply to any given shape is decently varied, but you have to bend it and wrestle with it to get anything to do what you want. See in the above image, those black bars in the animation pane on the right? That's a spin effect. In order to get Janice to shake in horror, I had her dress spin 0.5 degrees clockwise in a span of 0.1 seconds over and over and over again. It was possible to do, and the effect turned out looking alright, but I can't help but feel like there had to be a better way to do that.

I don't animate often, and I don't animate particularly well, so I don't know how common vector shape animation is, but that's all you can do in PowerPoint. That's why I keep talking about putting effects on shapes. If you want something to move, you've got to make that something a smart object and give it a set of choreography instructions from a predefined list. There's plenty of customization within that list (a shocking amount, actually. Like I mentioned, you can make fear quivers from spins). But it ultimately feels like it's more geared for text effects. Like some sort of presentation software or something.

I'm expecting too much from PowerPoint. Just because it can be used as a vector drawing program doesn't mean it should be. And just because it can be used to make fancy WWII era dark-comedy animations doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job. It fact, it's probably one of the worst. It's like an artist who dedicates his life to creating portraits in bottle caps. They may be wonderful portraits, but ultimately it's an unnecessary and somewhat silly limit to put on an artist.

So yeah. I guess if every you felt the compulsion to make animations in PowerPoint, the lesson here is don't. Use different software. It's probably easier and the results will probably be better. I'm not really sure what other audience I could possibly be writing this for.

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.

It's Done! Sorta!

Paradium and You has been submitted to the film festival with fifteen seconds to spare.

The reason you're getting the world's least enticing spoiler gif instead of the finished movie is because I'm not quite happy with how it looks yet.

The animation's done, the voice work is done, but there are certain elements of theming that still need work. It just doesn't quite look and feel like a 1950's PSA. I submitted what I had because the deadline was literally seconds away and it is, more or less, done.

You might be wondering why I don't just give you the version I submitted and call it quits. Not a single one of you has even the remotest chance of giving me an award, and in that way you're pretty similar to the film festival committee. But there is a difference about you, my site audience, that entitles you to the absolute best I can give you.

You don't put deadlines on me.

I'll have the movie up tomorrow, when I feel like it, maybe, whatever.

Storm's a Brewin'



 

The storm came through and drowned the land.

Took with it all but one.
In the dark she quitely stands
to greet the perished sun.

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!