Friday 28 August 2009

The Customer is always right ...

I've spent quite a bit of this week creating a character design and some cartoons for one of the UK's leading Garage spares retailers.
The company owner is having his website redesigned and wanted a caricature of himself as part of the branding. Great job! I love doing caricatures - but the pressure's on to make sure the caricature is pretty good looking when your customer is an ex Royal Marine Commando.

I'll be adding these to the character design section in my cartoon portfolio when I next get some time - but in the meantime here's a taster ...

Friday 14 August 2009

I Tube, You Tube, We All Tube

This week I decided that it was about time I started to put some of the Flash cartoons I've been creating up on YouTube.
I've started with a short promo for the PatsyJames animation I've been working on with Noa Jones. Now I've hit a few things exporting from Flash and uploading to YouTube...


Firstly, when I exported my animation from Flash as a .mov with the default settings and uploaded to YouTube the results were awful. The animation was jumpy and a whole load of key frames were missed.... yuk! So far I've found that if you File...ExportMovie enter a suitable *.mov and then click QuicktimeSettings you get a whole range of useful settings. If on the VideoSettings you change the compression type from the default of "Animation" to "H.264" the results are a whole lot better.

Secondly, if I'm posting a link to a YouTube video I don't necessarily want the related video suggestions they have at the end. But there's an easy workaround for that. You can simply add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code. On a similar(ish) note you can add ‘&loop=1′ to get the video to loop around automatically.

I'm uploading at the moment and will update with links to the promo when it's done.