JenniBee

I kind of fumbled a bit on making a blog post for this, but I can correct it now.

The third annual January Animation Month is under way!  The JAM is a challenge to create 31 animations (anything from flash animations to animated gifs) during the month of January.  It doesn't have to be an animation a day, so there's still plenty of time to join in!

There's a thread at the Telltale Games forums (www.telltalegames.com/forums/s…) where the JAM is happening if you want to join in, but it's not necessary.  Just posting the animations here or anywhere as part of the 2013 JAM gets you in on the fun!

It's a new year, I'm late, yes but I did do stuff.  I just forgot to put it up here.

It's the year of the dragon!  I've got a bunch of ideas this year for art stuff.  Well, I always have a bunch of ideas.  I usually just never get too many of them done.

But I'll get at least a few up this year I'm sure.

This month I'm doing the February Album Writing Month (www.fawm.org). I signed up for FAWM last year, and posted a few posts in the message board before February started, but once February was here, I didn't do anything.   So, I'm pretty much a FAWMling this year.  I never made an entire song in my life before this month.  The entire bulk of my song making was of tunes that lasted a few seconds that were in my animations.

This FAWM has been good so far.  On the first day, I made my first one minute song called Slipping Serenity, which is an instrumental made in Mario Paint Composer with the real sound soundfont.  I put my January Animation Month animations to good use too, since I made a music video for the song with them and uploaded it here.

They have weekly challenges that give you song ideas.  This week is "numbers", and I already have an idea for a song and an animated music video to go with it.  The crazy thing is, you'd think I'd be sick of animating after 31 days of it, but now that I'm writing songs I just want to animate more!

I am trying to do an animation every year for January Animation Month.  I am keeping a list of all my animations at the Telltale Forums (www.telltalegames.com/forums/s…).  I've posted for all three days so far, but the second one uses copyrighted characters without permission, so I'm going to post a 2a over here some time.  I was sick on the third, so I wasn't able to finish the animation as I had intended.  I posted an animated gif of what I had done so I could have an animation to show for that day, but I'm going to finish it (and I've decided it won't count for that day's animation) and post it over here.

That animation is from a script idea I had for an animated television show called Diamond Joe that was to be an animated sitcom like The Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park, etc.  I doubt I'll ever end up doing enough animation for a full show, so I decided to resurrect the idea as a series of shorts since the script contained some gags that would work fine as stand-alone.  As a bonus, if I do decide to go back to the television show idea, I'll already have some animation finished for it.

I also finally got my web comic (Jenni) animated as a video with the first JAM, or I guess you could call it a Jenni JAM

I've been fooling around with converting my videos to flash.  I've done it before, but the results weren't as nice as I'd have liked.  I now found a nice combination of programs which turn out video looking as nice as the original, and add a nice pre-loader as well.

I use AVS Video Converter to convert the video to flash, and then add a pre-loader to it with Flashkicker.  One of these days I'll probably mess with flash itself, but for now this works great for me.