Hardyman: The Movie + Restaurant Video

[Dr. Daedalus]

Hey guys, it's been a good long while but I finally made a new video! It's a parody of all those Hollywood movie trailers. You can watch it either at my website: http://www.freewebs.com/speedyboris/myvideos.htm , or at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mp87NaifTGY .

This one was a lot of fun to make. The great thing about making this trailer was that I could go crazy with the animation because all the scenes weren't connected in any way, and that also gave a variety of backdrops.

BTW, if you feel like it, I DID experiment with Flash like I said I would: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrpJQx-NvEg . Though I found Flash fairly difficult and frustrating to use efficiently, so I went back to trusty AppleWorks/iMovie. I may experiment with Flash again in the future but not for a while, I think.

Comments on either video?

[James]

Some nice gags, edits and parodying there. Everyone seems to be parodying in animation. Nice little filler gags.

I must admit I didn't spot any real differences between the FLASH and your usual mode of animation.

[Dr. Daedalus]

I must admit I didn't spot any real differences between the FLASH and your usual mode of animation. Is that a good thing? :)

When I first tried out Flash, I experimented with tweaning, but the results were disastrous. So I figured just to try and replicate the way I did my AppleWorks videos, and things came out decent, not great, though. If you'll notice, there's no actual character movement in the video. It's all mouths moving, nothing else. The reason being that it got confusing with all the layers. I would draw a new blank key frame but for some reason when I went to fill in the colors, it would fill in part of the background too. I was most certainly doing something wrong but it was incredibly frustrating, and it ended up taking me the same time it took me to make a 20 second video in Flash that it would to make a 1:30 or 2 minute video in AppleWorks.

The other main problem I ran into was file output. If you view the Flash file on my website and not YouTube, you'll notice the sound and video aren't lined up correctly. Video is significantly slower and thus all the comic timing and mouth movements are screwed up. Exporting to a movie file removed this problem, but I sacrificed the highest video quality doing that. So frustrating, and I'm sure there's a way to fix that too, but I looked through help and couldn't find anything.

The one thing that was indeed handy about Flash was how everything was in one place; I didn't have to make frames in one program and then put them together in another. Logic tells me that I should keep working with Flash because it's the "industry standard", but being that I've used AppleWorks for years and have gotten incredibly skilled at it, I figure I might as well keep using what I'm comfortable with. :)