Chris Lackey Lecture

A lecture at University was taken by Chris Lackey, a man of many talents. Animator, Illustrator, Writer to name but three.
He gave a great look at crowd funding, using his experience from his graphic novel, Transreality. He also told us about freelancing, working for free and building a fan base (the last two being my questions). He agreed about parodies being a great way to bring attention to yourself and that you need to be careful when working for free. Basically, money and contacts are the keys.
If you read this, Chris, thanks for the lecture and tips!

Link to Chris Lackey's Youtube

Meeting Tomska

Yesterday was a Youtube Meet & Greet with Tomska. Taking place in Leeds City Centre about 50-odd people turned out for the event. A bunch of questions were asked and answered, some fanboy/girl, others ACTUAL questions.
I got the chance to ask him about building fan bases as large as those you find for animators, comedians and film makers that you find on Youtube. He simply told me to make some parodies and get them on Youtube. People will connect with the properties that they enjoy and you can begin to build fans from there.
He also said that in an upcoming video he will be making a video covering questions like this.

LINK TO TOMSKA'S YOUTUBE

Rain Test1

http://www.fastswf.com/_cqHETg

Flash Rain Test. The rain drops are lines converted to fills, then Alpha Gradient added. Duplicated multiple times and resized. Repeated on a second layer, resized and moved around, then tweened. The house was placed on a layer between the rain, with rain splats FBF and duplicated.


FASTSWF is probably the best SWF upload site at the moment, in my opinion. Other sites I've tried resize the file and show the "dead area", which annoys me.

Michel Gagne is awesome.

http://www.gagneint.com/Final%20site/Animation/irongiant/Iron_Giant_main.htm

Some behind the scenes stuff of his work on The Iron Giant (1999) - which is one of my favourite 2D animated films.
This link shows work of the "Dome Of Doom" - where the giant launches a ball of plasma(?) energy out over the sea when he is attacked by the (evil) humans! BOO! HISS!

Flash Water Splash Tutorial!

Stephen Brooks (of www.rubberonion.com <-- Check him out if you haven't already) shared this via the Rubber Onion Animation Facebook page. The effect it gives is amazing! A must-know for any Flash animator wanting to make effects look convincing!
Flash FX Blog

Making of Paperman - Disney

http://www.cgmeetup.net/home/the-making-of-paperman/

Link shared by Henrik Safegaard Cloneartist via his Scoop.it page.
I really like the style of Paperman and I wondered how it was done for quite some time. Thankfully, Henrik has shown me how!