Beau Bo D'Or

Dave Brown in The Indy – This link takes you to the comments page where you can then click to enlarge. A direct link can mess up your browser.
The cartoon link from the comments page is updated daily, so this will be out of date tomorrow.
and
Morten Morland in The Times – This link takes you to the cartoon section, so it will be gone in a few days.
Very different styles, lovely ‘gags’ analogies/settings – both outstanding.
Great stuff.

I’m trying out YouTube to post a couple of things before my evaluation period of the new Flash software expires.
To make things easier on bandwidth if folk want to see or share, I’ve uploaded my recent Lib Dem animation. an updated version of my recent Lib Dem animation to display the minor calamity that happened between the leadership candidates yesterday.

btw. It’s not a mistake me tagging this post with Chris Huhne, Nick Huhne, Nick Clegg and Chris Clegg.
The video, before YouTube converted it, looked very clean but the conversion has muddied it a fair bit. I’ve left the original animation a few posts back which is crisper but it doesn’t have the updates. I’ve uploaded the first version (with some minor amendments) to my YouTube account as well.
I would ask that no commercial site runs it, including the larger blogs that seem to provide more advertising (which downloads soooooo verrrrrrry slowly) than sense these days.
I’ve made a few other small amendments to the animation- The swarming birds have been tidied up, a few sound effects added and I’ve tried to sort out the cloud movement in the second half, so when the ‘camera’ becomes stationary, the clouds slowly go in the opposite direction from those in the first half, when the camera angles are reversed.
Note for Flash animators :
Converting so it would work in video took ages because, even in the newest version of Flash, you have to manually change embedded movie clip property settings from ‘video’ to ‘graphic’ and (after checking via Google) set these at ‘play once’. NO! :
Not ‘play once’. If you want it to play once, then that’s fine but if you want a clip to loop during a tween, (flapping wings for example) then set it to loop. That seems pretty obvious doesn’t it, but the advice I found on the web seemed to say that the embedded clips would only work if they were set to play once.
Adobe needs to get its act together on exporting an animation correctly to video without the user having to reset say, one hundred, embedded clips manually. They should also make clear that you cannot export to Quicktime unless you have Quicktime Pro because if you haven’t shelled out for it, Flash works away exporting the damn file and then hangs at 100%.