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March 31, 2005
Little Ninja
Ninjai: The Little Ninja should be inspiring to anyone interested in creating online animation. I don't care for the story or the characters, but the visual style is excellent.
Posted by mslaybau at 12:16 PM | Comments (0)
The Old Negro Space Program
The Old Negro Space Program is one of those 'mockumentaries' that is just so darn funny. There is overt humor, but at another level is the parodying of all the Ric and Kevin Burns films, and at another level is an indirect perspective on race relations in America.
Posted by mslaybau at 12:11 PM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2005
The Future Stinks
The assignment was to study the style of Terry Gilliam, who was adept at making animations with a minimum of actual animating (note how he never bothers to animate anyone's feet). So I did virtual cutouts in AfterEffects, reducing color to bring the file sizes down, and made this. (1.5MB)
Now, unfortunately, the format is MP4 - so many players won't recognize it. You'll have to save to your desktop and see if any of your players can read it.
I could upload it into another format, but the compression artifacts and file size of the MP4 version are better than they were in any other format I tried.
I'm quite happy with the song. I had also been studying formulae for pop songs (both formally and informally) and came up with a tune that's quite catchy.
If you want to hear just the song, and MP3 is here (600KB)
Posted by mslaybau at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)
March 16, 2005
Compressing Animation Through Color Reduction
I've been doing a lot of experimenting with animation compression, looking for the best format to deliver photo-quality moving images while minimizing both the download time and the need for the user to have to bother with external players.
Sorenson Squeeze does a good job, and I was happy with how MP4 files could have such good compression with minimizing the degradation of image quality. However, a lot of players don't even recognize the format, and players such as Winamp will play the audio but none of the video.
In terms of delivery, it seemed that an animation has to be embedded into a Flash movie if I want to have a majority of people able to see it without trouble.
In terms of reducing download-time, I wondered why amid the thousands of lossy video codecs there seemed to be none based on color palette reduction. So one experiment was to make a ginormous animated gif of one of my stop-motion animations.
Here is the animation reduced to 7-bit color depth (128 colors)
It's 320x240px, and about 1.3MB.
And here is the same animation reduced to 3-bit color depth (8 colors) at 640x480. The size is about 4.2MB
I quite like the gritty color-optimized look of the second one. There is no real loss of visual information, and in fact adds to the visual effect. I don't want to bother making any more 100+ frame animated gifs, but color compression and embedding in Flash is the way I'm going to continue.
Posted by mslaybau at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)