Animation Project

OK, here's the final result of my animation project. I couldn't say that I "finished" it as much as I simply decided to stop working on it. To be completely frank I feel like I wasn't able to get it to the level I wanted and I feel like it looks pretty low-rent, but it does include all the elements I detailed in my sketch and discussed online, so that's something. It's a commercial for my fictional design company. For the background I took a picture of my backyard and tarted it up a little in Photoshop. I created the text and the images in Illustrator. I drew the dogs and cats by hand with the Paintbrush tool and used the Shape tool to help create the pencil. The hardest part turned out to be getting the rain of cats and dogs the way I wanted, as I'm nowhere near mastering the subtleties of the animation tools in Flash. Subsequently I feel like that's the weakest-looking part, but again, at least it exists. I recorded my own original soundtrack music on my guitar, just using the onboard computer microphone. I timed it out to fit the length of the clip, but the ending of the music still ends up a little abrupt. The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do at all was to get the 3D text I created in Illustrator to maintain its 3D effect when I brought it into Flash; somehow the 3D got lost in the transition. Anyhow, the whole thing was the best I could do; I spent so much time fiddling with it that I had repetitive stress syndrome for a couple of days afterwards!

Flash Animation Sketch

Here's my sketch for my Flash animation idea. And here's hoping I haven't bitten off more than I can chew! We'll soon find out. :)

It's a commercial for my own fictional design company, Allen Design. The background will be a photo I take of a grassy patch, probably my own back yard. I'll bring that in through Photoshop. I'll have the sun rising to the top of the page, then I'll have the cats and dogs falling down from the sky. I plan to create those in Illustrator. And in the end, to make my visual pun I'll have my logo sitting on top of a giant pencil point, which I'll probably also make in Illustrator. Please click the image below to enlarge.