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Various "Flipnotes" (2009...)

Link:
http://flipnote.hatena.com/penduin/

Nintendo released a free program for the DSi called Flipnote Studio. In many ways it's a spiritual successor to Mario Paint, with more emphasis on animation and community. I've had lots of fun with it, primarily during nights of insomnia, scribbling up stupid little stuffs.

Disgruntled Critters (2001)

Download:
disgruntled-critters-divx.avi - 4.5M
disgruntled-critters-mpg - 11.7M

This little bit of classical music slapstick was born many years before I animated these critters. I'll post the video that Kris and I made (when we were 10 or something) if I can hunt it down. I modeled and animated this using Blender, which has undergone a great deal of evolution but remains one of my favourite programs. Disgruntled Critters made Blender's home page, which I felt proud enough about to keep a screenshot. :^)

Sleepwalking (2002)

Download:
sleepwalk.mpg - 3.7M

My college notebooks contained, depending on the class, more doodles than actual notes. This particular doodle wanted to become a video, so using the GIMP, another one of the best programs ever, I chopped it up and let it move around. It was used as part of an art film Alison made, "Walnut Street" (walnut-street.mpg - 124M), and as such was projected on the side of her house late at night for drunk people to gawk at and neighbors to complain about.

Worm Strip-tease (2002)

Download:
wormstrip.mpg - 6.5M

Early on in college, Rose told me I had to make an animation of a worm doing a strip-tease. I never even really knew her and I have no idea how it came up, but I was (jokingly, I'm pretty sure) tasked with making such a ridiculous thing. When I was about to graduate, I needed some filler animation, preferably funny, for "Walnut Street" (see "Sleepwalking" above) so I quickly GIMP'd this up. The hardest part was finding the music, strangely. My roommate Rob was the hero, having scratched it out triumphantly from a huge batch of not-what-we-were-looking-for files with "stripper" in the title. :^)

Note the eerie similarity of the setting to my previous "Disgruntled Critters". That was accidental, believe it or not. Created from scratch both times, this one in 2D only.

The Adventures of the Shmoe (1996)

Download:
shmoe.ogm - 25.4M

Early on in high school, my friend Joe and I took any excuse we could to create animation. I don't remember if we got to pass this off as an assignment or not. I can't imagine what academic credit anybody would have given us for it, apart from the fact that we worked our asses off on it.

I found the animation in its original scripted-series-of-FLIC-files form, zipped and spanned across 15 floppy disks, many years later. They all still worked, so I converted the animation scenes to modern formats and read through the automation script, figuring out framerates, loops, audio synchronization, and all that fun stuff. After some trial and error, I had a pretty faithful recreation of our animation. I still have a lossless, oddball-ratio 320x200 version, if anybody cares.
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