Portent

On the National Film Board of Canada, there are Fifty NFB animated shorts, including several animation classics, that can be accessed directly. You can search them by title, director and year of production.

The one shown graphically (“Air” by Paul Driessen in 1972) illustrates what lack of oxygen means! It left me breathless!

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This may not work for everybody so my apologies if you can’t access the linked web site. WPF is part of Vista but comes separately ( I have Windows XP but upgraded to the recent version of the .NET Framework) and is a demo of Microsoft’s new display technology. It can also be used on websites (with a small download) if you have WPF installed.

This is a nice demo of WPF- it makes a web page just like using Windows with slick multi tabbed controls, sliders and some 3D display. Yes it could be done in Flash but would probably take a lot more work. It’s all part of the future of the web- do we want slick graphics and videos but easy website development or still stuck in a HTML page with embedded videos mindset? Microsoft are trying to make it easier to develop web sites like this. And they will be accessible from non-Windows PCs. Interesting stuff! After nearly 15 years of html websites, it’s about time!

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Youtube.com is full of funny, interesting and daft videos but sometimes you come across a video which is artistically and aesthetically pleasing, even if you really haven’t got a clue what is going on.

“Inner Life of a Cell” is one such and won a Telly Award 2006. Linked is the 3 minute condensed version of a longer 9 minute piece. With a great soundtrack this is a beautiful animation. I think I recognised DNA both forming and being spliced but I could be way wrong. It’s 3 minutes and 8 seconds of delight.

This Press Release explains what it is about and why. “The first in a planned series of animations for Harvard University’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, “The Inner Life of the Cell” takes undergrads beyond textbooks and vividly illustrates the mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus.”

The company behind this is XVIVO and they create animations for pharmaceuticals, medical devices and biotech companies, advertising etc. The gallery on their website is well worth a look.

Link (To Youtube video)

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I’ve never been fond of Flash but there’s no denying that it lets designers do some amazing effects. Where theres a lot of Flash code to load, the better designers usually provide a pre-loader; an animation usually showing a %loaded.

That’s all this site does though they do let you filter by year and provide information about the site that each pre-loader was used in. There are some brilliant animations there…

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This is nicely done. It’s not just a clock but also has a count of various statistics such as births, deaths, amount of oil pumped, co2 emissions etc.

It’s nicely rendered in Flash and you can change the view from year, month, week, day or reset from now. Since I reset it and started typing this 300 people have died and 450 born. There’s a breakdown of the various causes of death, cardio vascular being the highest. Surprisingly Traffic accidents and suicide are far higher than from military. Fascinating stuff- I could watch it all the time!
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If you give a reasonable amount of cash to a Bafta (for Craft) winning company, the result is an excellent and quirky website.

Done completely in Flash, the basic concept reminds me a little of Danny Wallace’s “Join Me”. By doing real favours to others (eg Buy someone a drink, give them your paper, babysit etc), you can create a “favour” a little animated flatulent libidinous ball or join someone else’s flock, in both cases entering what you did. You can also win prizes.

You can also get new ideas by clicking on a favour on the home page. There’s an excellent animated video which is well, just watch it.

Production quality is very high I couldn’t possibly fault it. My only complaint is that it reminds me of Film websites; very high production quality but not built or meant to last. All websites (this one included) need to reinvent themselves, add new features etc. Favourfarm was created as a viral for vinspired.com a Youth volunteering site is such a good idea, it should be continued and grown.

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It’s back again! No I don’t have any involvement or stand to get anything from having people click through, except it improves my mini-city. Someday I’ll be able to look at my Metropolis and think why?

It’s currently traffic jammed up; I know the feeling! More visitors paradoxically frees  up the traffic jam. That’s video game logic for you!

I’ll give you a clue, green is good, red is bad.

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Though the title is from Star Wars, the game design is the old Defender game where aliens are capturing humans and taking them into space.

This would be well done in Flash but for JavaScript it’s excellent with what looks like 50 or 60 moving objects on screen (explosions bullets etc) and a parallax scrolling mountains. I’d also suggest you try it in the chrome browser because that has a very fast JavaScript engine. i have only one minor criticism and that is you can easily miss the ship at the start (it’s in the bottom left corner- blends in well with the mountains!). If you really need it, read the game overview on his blog.

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This is the end scene from one of Jacquie Lawsons’s classy animated e-cards. Normally if I receive an email saying “You have received a message from a friend” it’s spam, but here knowing both who sent it and that the link clearly points to this website is reassuring.

I rarely mention commercial sites but a subscription of £6.25 ($12.00) is not exorbiitent and the card’s animations are very well done, synched to music. You can view them yourself before joining and each is a work of art. As e-cards go these are high quality. (Note, I have no connection finacial or otherwise and receive no reward for recommendation- I’ve received two and I really like them!). And Hey they’re a British website…

this is their card of the month link:

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This is quite a neat way of showing recent stories about virgin brand businesses whenever they appear on the web. The flash animated radar (with a number of display options) shows each story as a star with older stories moving towards the periphery. Occasionally these fly into the centre so perhaps they’ve been updated or appeared elsewhere.

You can also filter on the various companies, I’d never heard of Blue Holidays or Virgin Comics. Hey this story might appear there in a day or two! Overall it’s quite a neat animation.

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This takes a few seconds so have patience! Spore is a newly launched game by veteran game designer Will Wright- famous for Sim City and of course the Sims.

Spore is his latest and possibly greatest game in which you sort of play God! Starting with a tiny single cell critter, you evolve it to a bigger critter then move into land, form a tribe conquer the world and then go into space. What makes it so compelling is that you get to select the path of evolution by choosing all sorts of legs, fins, flippers, tentacles; a massive collection of parts which the game is able to animate. that’s the really clever part. And it gets better- you can share your critter or use others and the Sporepedia (pictured) now have over 8.2 million.

Earlier today it had 8.1 million so that’s over 100,000 added today. As the game is being launched thats probably to be expected but still quite remarkable! I have ordered a copy of Spore so the Portentaurus when I have created it might yet grace these pages…

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Yes it doesn’t look much but it’s reasonably smooth animation with collision detection running in JavaScript. Hats off to the Swedish programmer (I guess) Bjoern Lindberg.

The controls are simple just g to toggle gravity, h to split blobs and j to join them. You can use cursor keys to move them or drag them with the mouse. Very neat demo.

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This is very well done by artist Alan Becker. He draws a small figure in photoshop (I think) named Victim and proceeds to torment the little stick figure. Then the stick figure escapes and engages in a full battle onscreen, mostly within Photoshop against the animator using the features of Photoshop.

This is very nicely done and highly recommended to fill in a dull moment or two!
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Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

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This is a Flash demo of a C++ Physics engine. Yes it sounds like something only a programmers mother would recommend but some of the demos are fun such as the falling rag dolls pictured.

A physics engine is a piece of code that lets software model real world physics. A human can be thought of as a series of lines joined together (that describes the limits of my artistic ability!). But the angles that those lines make is constrained in the real world by bones, ligaments etc. Bending your arms back until they snap off is not a good idea!

In software a physics engine does that and lots more- objects roll or slide down slopes according to the pull of gravity and friction. This site shows a clever bit of conversion work off a C++ (programming language) physics engine into Flash. Very impressive.

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