Capture the Sword 2: Cavern Clash

Remember Capture the Sword? It's a Minecraft PVP game that I created a while back. Think capture the flag, but with swords. I made a new map for it, and it can be downloaded below. And below that there's some nice pictures of what it looks like.

I am good at descriptions of things and stuff.

Download (Mediafire)

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.

Abstraction

2D design class again today. The new topic is abstraction. This is my take on a fish skeleton. I feel like it's too literal, though. Still pretty cool.

Janice, the Paradium Gal

Posts are probably going to be a little scarce for the next few days. I want to make this animation for the film festival look good and I don't have very much time to do it. Also I don't know much about animating. I've got my work cut out for me, is what I'm saying.

So for a while at least I'll be putting up work-in-progress updates like this one as I go. Meet Janice, my attempt at a fifties-style cartoon character.

It's a good thing I have confidence in the script or this project would be pretty much hopeless.

Paradium: The Threatening Threat

Poster from a short film I'm working on right now in a futile hope that I can get it done before midnight tonight. There's this student film festival I only learned about today, which gives me about four hours to make a six minute film. Unfortunately, I happened to blab a bit to some folks about possibly entering, so now my back's against the wall. Minimalist animation ahoy!

Update: Deadline was just pushed back three days. Now I feel like I can actually put some serious effort behind this! Here's a shot of the "poster" in "action" which is really just a "rushed photoshop job."



Antiscian Exile

Obambulating through refugium,
here rusticated by zabernism.
Myriarchy of tirocinium,
rules over martinets with nomism.
Cursorial thoughts of athanasic void.
The dacnomania in me forms anew,
as xanthocarpous spinnies make matoid,
as xanthochroic fruits are wont to do.
Anhedonia and analgia,
biune in never diastrophic land.
Ubication seen as dyslogia,
clinamen assigned solely to shend.
Postliminy sublated by bêtise,
A gement puts antiscians at ease.

A Fall from Grace

A fall from grace, a bitter song that mocks.
This wretched form is lost and left behind.
I wander through the bramble and the rocks,
and long for times bygone when I was blind.
Grace taught my heart to fear this dead valley,
how precious did that grace seem to me then.
The hour I first believed, it came to be:
and here I've wandered through and through again.
Succumbed have I to dangers, toils, and snares
at what such price is it to be restored?
The lord forsaketh me no more, nor cares
for it is I who doth forsake the lord.
When I've been here ten thousand years, this Hell
I'll have no fewer days than when I fell.

Interrogation of the Optimist

"Just tell me lest you die upon the shore,
your body pulled into arid expanse."
"A lovely day to die upon the shore,
the sound of crashing waves an ambiance."
"Then tell me lest you die up in the sky,
from splattered guts will jut your shattered bone."
"A lovely day to die up in the sky,
an everlasting free fall mine alone."
"Well tell me lest you die engulfed in flame,
fire licking at your ever-charring corpse."
"A lovely day to die engulfed in flame,
to feel an ember as it slowly warps."
"You bend not to threats of death. Tell me why."
"I fear it's just a lovely day to die."