Portent

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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Imagine a flash animation that combined Star Trek with the Flintstones with characters such as Captain James T Kirkstone, First Officer Sprock, Leonard RcKoy- you get the idea. The characters look like the Flintstones in Star Trek uniforms and there’s a running gag about red shirts who keep getting bumped off.

This is an excellent series with terrific cartoon animation and some mad plots- for example Pod racing on Tatooine- it’s clearly not afraid to take from other sci fi (e.g. Star Wars). My only hate- the canned laughter track, otherwise this is fantastic. And check out the animation to go with the Firm’s 1987 hit “Star Trekkin”.

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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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Recreating the entire 2001 film in Lego would be a massive undertaking and wisely this doesn’t attempt to do that. Instead in just one minute it gives a potted take of the best scenes, e.g. the ape striking the bone which segues into Discovery (not as nice looking as this Lego Discovery!), then the scene where HAL 9000 tries to prevent Dave Bowman from re-entering the ship and the final psychedelic trip voyage and finish in the Hotel room.

However it does play for laughs with digital text on the Monolith “Hit things with Sticks!” and an accurate observation by HAL “I can’t Dave, I’m nuts…”. This is nicely done and very professional looking. It may only last a minute but clearly a lot of time and effort went into making it.

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Gerhards.net is a German and English website about space and astronomy. Using data from EUMETSAT the site displays monthly cloud animations on Earth.

This is fascinating stuff- watching the equatorial winds going from East to West while further north and south they go in the opposite direction. The satellite is geostationary positioned on the equator at 0 degrees latitude so it shows the view from the UK in the north, over Africa down to Antartica.

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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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Sol it’s just another boring online product store? Not quite! Just watch it for a few seconds…

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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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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 interesting, for a while anyway! It drops a lot of triangles which follow each other round, in a sort of virtual conga, except the head triangle then follows the tail, ie it’s a loop.

However it alters shape over time so you have to watch as tight kinks end up being removed. It’s a bit of a toy and I could easily see it as a screen saver.

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Courtesy of Princeton University this animated GIF shows the entire continental USA for each of the presidential voting years from 1960 to 2004 inclusive.

It is colour coded, red for democrats and blues for republicans so you can see how states have altered (or not) over the 44 years.

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The point and click puzzle genre has grown out of nowhere over the last few years and there are lots of them around. The idea is that each screen is a visual puzzle. When you click on part of the screen something happens. You have to figure out the ordering and solve that screen.

Where they vary is the degree of animation, sounds etc and the difficulty of the puzzles. The Grow puzzles are more logical while in Curious you have to help the main character escape each screen. This is guaranteed to keep you puzzling for quite a while!

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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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One of the benefits of the web is the way that material that would be hard to track down, due to geographical limitations becomes available. One site helping to do this is this blog Vintage Tooncast.

Films include many from Walt Disney, Betty Boop (Black and white) going back 70 years and more. If you like old cartoons this is a good place to look. The blog has been going nearly two years so there is a lot of stuff there.

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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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