I’m not sure where I stand on Flash/Actionscript. Not to suggest I don’t like/approve of it, I think it’s an amazingly flexible language/set of tools, I’m just not sure I should be playing with it.

My problem is that I rarely get offered Flash work so I don’t get a huge amount of practice. I have no real sense of how long it will take me to do something or what it’s worth, so in turn I tend to warn clients of this and probably end up undercharging them to a stupid degree. I enjoy the process of working with Actionscript, although ONLY if I’m using my PC with the stupidly big monitor. Theworkspace has improved since Adobe took over but it’s still far too cluttered and has hints of the old Macromedia workspace that I was never able to get my head around.

Anyway, once I’ve got past the “Oh fuck do I have enough hours to do this job in?” stage it always pans out ok, I HATE doing Flash work in a hurry, I’m happy to hack up PHP and HTML in my sleep but anything with Actionscript involved needs me to open my eyes and concentrate for a while, I like to leave that bit of space for the inevitable bit that turns out to be slightly trickier to code than expected.

I’ve just done my first Actionscript job of this year, I would have enjoyed it more had I had more than an evening to do it in but in this case it was an “OhGodWe’reAtTheDeadlineCanYouHelp?” type brief. I generally refuse these but Nick gives me a good amount of interesting work, and more importantly pays on time which really swings it for me. He needed a scrolling Flash menu system as part of a bigger flash project, I felt a bit in the dark trying to write functions for a system I didn’t have much information on but it worked out ok (pending Nick getting back to me). He needed it as a proof of concept to show the end client it would work ok, so to some extent I could have cheated and just shoved in some animation that looks like it works but frankly I’d rather do it properly first off.

Look at my sexy flash menu and read EXCITING notes on the brief and what it does.

It’s roughly based on a menu I worked on for Oliis. This one includes a back-end php/mysql system to edit it.

Just a note on the Killer B-Movie gig, it’s on the 31st March not the 21st. I am an idiot, I cannot read my own diary properly.

I did a wordpress!

My first crack at a Wordpress Template and I’m fairly happy with it. The template is for a site called “Conversations with a Cuban Sow” which I’m working on with Emily (Moonshine PR site doesn’t actually exist yet, this is on the list of “Stuff which must be sorted soon”). The Cuban Sow site is a PR blog for Emily’s mother’s forthcoming book of the same name which Emily is doing the PR for, in her words:

Conversations With a Cuban Sow is the forthcoming book by Elisabeth Bird, an English national living and working in Cuba.

This is Elisabeth’s blog, complied from letters sent to her daugher Emily over seven years and gives a fascinating insight into the daily toils and troubles, highs and lows of life in Cuba, both political and personal.

The WP template is very much a work in progress as currently Emily is still compiling the information for the site, technically it’s not been launched so I’m effectively making her life harder by now linking to it in advance of us finishing it off (sorry Em). It’s an interesting project to be involved with, there’s going to be a fair amount of content to come along with information on press coverage/etc so we will be modifying the template as the PR work builds up. I’m just going to have a quick tweak to make sure it’s all W3C compliant then lay off until Emily get’s her copy in order.

The layout itself is very simple and clean, it’s not aimed at designers it is purely a framework for Emily and Elisabeth’s words so it needs to be easily legible and simple to navigate. Emily drew the pig!

Working with Wordpress templates is a surprisingly pleasant experience, my background is very much in bespoke, ground up applications so it feels a little weird to be fiddling with something someone else has initially built, but the documentation is brilliant and the way the WP system works is so simple and effective I wish I’d started playing with it an age ago.

Aside from this I’ve been working on a mountain of other bits and pieces, the majority of it being paid work which isn’t of particular interest. I have just finished some nice Actionscript work which I may chuck up later on, also working on the complete branding for both Shinytastic, Moonshine PR, pretty much completed the History Of Guns album graphics, so now moving onto sticker and T-shirt designs for them while we plan the PR campaign. I’ve started writing a ‘Recommendations for Clients’ guide on how not to utterly piss off your Graphic Designer/Web Developer/etc which I may chicken out of posting. Still trying to get to grips with my new D40x, I purchased the Magic Lantern guide as recommended by Jen although forgot about bank holiday postage issues so probably won’t get a chance to read it until next weekend now. I did post some fucking awful photos from the Line Out Showcase in Southampton last weekend I really need some low light practice, I wanted to try and edit them but time really is not on my side right now. I also need to find time to completely rebuild OnLineOut.com, it’s starting to age badly. My big non-paid priority right now is to sketch out the long term plan for the label, but I want input from other people before I even start to think about that.

Happy Easter!

Got a random call from Kneill of Killer B-Movie asking if I knew how to make an old horror film style hypnotic spiral that changed colour over time. Apparently I do.

This is only a sample of the full DVD which is an hour long and cycles through a variety of colours, a complete colour change every five minutes. I had been tempted to do something a bit more extravagant with it but Kneill really wanted something simple and uncluttered. It’s intended as a backdrop for their gigs so hopefully the audience will be looking at the band more than the animation. This is the first gig projection I’ve been involved with in years, I’m going to go along to the gig and see how it works out (Killer B-Movie, March 21st, The White Horse, High Wycombe), come along it will be fun.

The spiral was drawn in Adobe Illustrator, imported into Flash, animated as a simple rotation, exported to an AVI, imported to EditStudio, old film effect added and tweaked, Vignette added, colour change on a keyframe every 5 minutes. Exported to AVI burnt to DVD. I quite like the final product (given it took all of an hour), it reminds me a bit of the steampunk graphic style used in Bioshock (although nowhere near as good). Kneill was happy with it, he was still playing it on the big screen on the wall of his tattoo shop when I left, I like that he had a customer sitting in the chair watching the spiral.

I’m still tempted to get hold of the Adobe video editing suite, but the cost is just too much right now, EditStudio does fine for the two video edits I tend to do a year, given a bit of spare time and money I’d like a chance to get good at it.