Monthly Archives: April 2013

Terry Gilliam knew how to use Flash back in 1974

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So I found this clip recently (actually, it found me – home screen of my Boxee box one fine day this past weekend).  It’s a great clip, Terry Gilliam runs through (so fast, he might as well been running…) his cut-out style animation for Monty Python Flying Circus.

What I love about this movie is that he’s showing exactly how great, fast and funny Flash animation is done – you don’t need to mess around with huge amounts of frame by frame animations or make perfect realism.  Sometimes, animating things in the bare bones is the best.  And it helps if you’ve got a sick and twisted sense of humor.  Best part is, Mr. Gilliam here (one day I would love to have him say to me, “call me Terry, please”) shows how to animate with small static pieces – just like breaking up your stuff into little bits in Flash.  While he had to shoot frame by frame, the basic concept is the same we have now with motion tweening.  This is the best lesson for students trying to learn the basics.

So that’s why I showed this to my class last night.  I started it out by asking, “Who here has seen Monty Python stuff before?”  A few hands went up.  One girl asked, “is that like an anaconda or something?” Another said, “I’ve heard of ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ but I’ve never seen it.”  The one student who actually is older than me rolled his eyes (I was too, in case you’re wondering).  Another student said, he’d only seen it because his girlfriend insisted he watch it (hope for the younger generation I guess!).

Still – I played this, there was glorious silence for 15 minutes, interjected by me yelling out things like, “we can do that with Photoshop now!” and “that’s basically motion tweening!” By end of class, I saw one girl redoing her project using black and white pictures cut out and put into Flash – and a few mentioned they were going to look for more Monty Python stuff over the weekend.

Game design part one

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So I’ve been thinking of an idea that’s been baking around in my skull for a while, and I’m thinking of building it out as a Flash game to start.

There’s a lot to keep track in this game idea, and so, just like I tell the students, this isn’t something where you throw everything into a pot and let it simmer — you have to prep first.  Thing is, I don’t know what all the ingredients are.

So what do you do if you don’t know where to start?  Turn on Flash and stare blankly at the screen? Nope.  I’m going back to the basics.  I have my pages and pages of notes.  I have vague ideas about levels and mini-games in the game.  I’m going to grab pencil and paper.  When I can’t draw out Evil Onion backgrounds and imagery any more, I’ll switch over to this.  When I’m tired of trying to figure out how to get lots of little bits and pieces to interact, I’ll go back to the onion.

I think that when I’m ready, what I have to do is come up with the game dynamics, fake some animation (little blocks instead of fully fleshed out characters) and get them to move and behave how they have to.  Once that works, I’ll go back and make clean animations.  This is what usually kills me.  I jump straight to the icing, forgetting the cake underneath.  Let’s see if I can be any better this time around.

Object(root).evil = true;

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I’ve taken a week off from updating this as I’m trying to catch up with everything that always seems to be barreling down my way.

I’m still working on the new onion story, trying to come up with some new interesting backgrounds – right now, I’m playing with poster ideas, using various sketch software on the iPad to try and come up with something.  Hell, I even played with 123D Sculpt to try and make a 3D onion…. that’s not coming out as well as I had hoped.  If only I could just sculpt him in real clay, then scan him in.  Because, you know, I have access to all that kind of equipment … or even clay. For now, here he is, squashing a flower.

onion squashing flower

One thing that keeps coming up (thanks in part to Theresa bringing it up on occasion) is, what other kinds of rude things will the evil onion do.  She wants him giving the finger.  What finger?  Do I have to give him arms first?!  Will he need legs too?  Will he end up looking like Chairface Chippendale, except an onion and not a chair?  This is a slippery slope, innit?

Still, today is the first night of class, and I’m going to see where this new batch takes me. Teaching is always an odd thing to me, since I’m working off topics that are very familiar to me, I don’t really feel like I’m teaching as much as I’m just explaining the obvious (yes, I know, obvious to me), but I generally feel that this stuff should be fairly easy to pick up once they give it a chance, and I should be there to just elaborate on the simplicity (or complexity) of the general ideas.

This is my second quarter teaching Flash, and I think it’s going to help me get to the ball rolling faster on the onion.  I think I’ll be taking the iPad and sketching during lab time a lot this quarter.