Agency: Zone Client: Puffin Books
We made this fun little Flash game earlier this year, and are chuffed to announce it’s up on Puffin’s website. You get to dress up your puffin in lots of different clothes in a variety of locations. You even get to print out the results of your sartorial selections.
Lovin’ My Puffin is a companion piece to the Green Puffin animation.
Woohoo!
Thanks to all those who showed up to watch Tim’s character animation session at Flash Brighton last night - the talk went well, and there was a good, useful chat afterwards about improving developer/designer workflow.
Flash Brighton is a group of people who meet weekly to discuss all things Flash, in Brighton. There’s a distinct geek flavour (smoky, with a hint of cumin?) to most meetings, but designers and animators are very welcome (after all, they did let Tim in) and it’s a great place to learn new stuff and eat biscuits.
Join the fun here.
The BBC have recently transmitted James May’s Big Idea - a major 3 part series devoted to some of the Top Gear presenter’s passions - transport, robots and energy. Bull and Gate were commissioned to design and animate the links between each episode’s numerous sequences. We developed a warm and engaging visual style, creating animated assets in Flash and compositing all the various elements in After Effects. Here are a selection of screenshots from the Robots episode:
We worked closely with the series Director and Executive Producer to produce approximately 24 sequences on time and within budget to an extremely tight deadline.
Tools used: Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Pens, Paper, Robots.
That nice man Aaron Simpson over at Cold Hard Flash has posted up a couple of video tutorials on the new bones tools in soon-to-be-here Flash CS4 (I believe it’s an October release). Clicky the pic for a link:
CHF tutorial
Adobe’s latest release of Flash is almost here. Looks to be a significant upgrade in several areas, especially for us poor old timeline animators. Notably, they’re adding IK, changes to keyframing (ie getting rid of keyframes(?)) and some kind of 3D element - pretty much along the lines of After Effects.
What we really want are independent cameras.
Here are some shaky ‘phone cams taken at various conferences:
Timeline shenanigans at Flash on the Beach:
IK demo at FOTB:
Super-3D at Flash in the City:
Fermac 860 copyright Bull and Gate 2008
We at Bull and Gate use all the usual tools for our animation work: Flash, After Effects, Photoshop etc. But we just couldn’t do without our trusty Fermec 860 Turbo Backhoe Loader!
Copyright Bull and Gate 2008
Burt digs holes, diggers dig holes. We all dig holes.
Haven’t updated in a while, as we’ve been busy making all kinds of lovely animation and games for our clients. Not only did we make the Young Bond site for Puffin Books / Zone, we’ve also produced 2 flash games for the Puffin web site. We’ll linked to them just as soon as they’re up.
Currently in Production
We’re producing a fully animated Flash web site for a London-based design company (more details in a few weeks), and are currently producing animated sequences for an upcoming BBC documentary (TX late September).
What Else?
We also have 2 animated series in development, and as with everything else in this post, we’ll post some pictures and movies just as soon as we’re allowed too!
I’d love to hear from any Brighton/Sussex based Flash animators out there who have a good understanding of cut-out style character animation. A liking for Yuri Norstein, french comic books and 2D is a definite plus. If you’re one, get in touch.
Not from Brighton/Sussex? Get in touch anyway!
