I may as well repost this then.
EDIT - Currently badly rated by one Lib Dem supporter who has now suggested that I delete the video and kill myself.
I am crushed.
BTW - If it doesn’t seem to be loading, click on it and you can see it directly from YouTube.
(Looks like YouTube has a bit of a problem with the embedding at the moment.)
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%.
I started from scratch again and it took a while plus there were a few probs with the file size.
If you don’t know the music, congratulations, you’re younger than me.
Pop over to the Little Gems site and look for Belle et Sebastien (theme and incidental music used) and The Flashing Blade.
I really wanted to use the Singing Ringing Tree and Robinson Crusoe music, but neither fits the animation.
The Flashing Blade lyrics seem to match the animation quite nicely.
If you don’t get the analogies, maybe it is a bit contrived but I don’t think so. I’m too knackered to explain my line of thinking 
I know it seems counterintuitive to put up animations or images that make people ponder a bit, considering a lot of virals are essentially quick-fixes (nothing wrong in that), but that’s what I prefer.
I’ve converted it to the new Flash standard. If you can’t see it, please let me know.
Please note that the full animation has now been completed and posted here - Link.
I haven’t posted too much this week, something I hope to correct next week.
Distractions aside, the main reason is I started working on a very brief animation. Although it remains brief, it increased in complexity due to additions and, probably, poor planning. In my defence, you can be halfway through an animation and then have an idea which you do want to include but yet some hours work have to be amended (sometimes binning it and starting again can be quicker.). There’s no way I can plan ideas if you know what I mean.
Anyway, at 5 this morning, I thought, well I’ll just post the damn thing but realised I still have to sweeten the thing up and tweak it a little which I plan to do today and tomorrow.
So, here’s a trailer for it. It’s not a big all singing and dancing production like some of the stuff I’ve created with the wonderfully talented eccentric eclectech and doghorse but I’m reasonably happy with it. Due to cropping the animation, the background in the final scene doesn’t move in the trailer but does so in the final product.
I hope to have the thing complete for Monday morning and then focus on some other parties and countries as well. (A tad too many yellow bird motifs recently.)
The trailer has sound. I trust you recognise the music. In my search for the right sound, I revisited a great site for fans of 70s kids shows called Little Gems which hosts various stills and music clips. I sourced the music from elsewhere but it would be rude of me not to mention a little gem of a site.
Trailer removed as finished item is in this post and I need to save bandwidth.
Difficult to distinguish between candidates and rumours of selection being based on style and ‘cultural’ criteria.
Lembit Opik has ruled himself out despite calls to do so from members who believe it would make the party more ‘entertaining’.
As I completed this, I got a niggling feeling that someone may already have done an Ant and Dec/Lib Dem spoof - If so, apologies.
As Scotland sees a return of its favourite dinosaur. (sorry, cruel and unfair - temptation got the better of me.)
The Lib Dems relaunch themselves as a dynamic, go-faster-stripes party with a new logo. (Hopefully an animation soon using this character.) (pic now updated)
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