Professional Practice – Week 05


The logo work for angryPixel feels like it’s nearing a conclusion. Via some experiments animating the work I’d done in Illustrator, I made some cosmetic changes to the greyscale version that I wrapped up last week.
I’m in two minds about breaking up the horizontal-ness throughout each of the elements, but for now I think I’ll leave it be. I’m in danger of over-cooking things already and really should be moving on to rolling it out across a screen-based business card and letterhead.
Adobe TV has been surprisingly helpful to me over the past week. There are some truly excellent tutorials to be found there, and with them not being strictly Adobe-creations, there is a breadth of knowledge to draw on, as well as some good links to other resources. The first of these was an After Effects 3D box tutorial, which led me to aescripts.com.
Contrary to the information in the tutorial (which may be getting on), the downloads on aescripts are not free. They are however, donationware, and the creators really should be thanked for that. Being able to name your price for software is something that Radiohead made famous when releasing their In Rainbows LP via the same concept: pay what you think it’s worth. There have been many arguments as to why only a band as big as Radiohead could make this model a success, but I think the explosion of lower-cost software, such as iPhone apps, show that people will pay – instead of pirate – if they see the price as reasonable. I’d like to see some long-term figures showing how many people pay generously for donationware though.
As directed by the tutorial on Adobe TV, I picked up a 3D shapes script and put it to work on a cube. I then sent it from After Effects to Flash via XFL, to see what the After Effects to SWF vs Flash to SWF results would be…
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It seems that exporting directly from After Effects as SWF yields a better visual result, but a much larger file. Though I don’t know how much of this is the SWF-centric optimisation within Flash and how much is simply lost between After Effects and Flash.
The outcome was fine as a test process, but for the time being at least, there isn’t really a purpose for this little red box. Particularly as 3D isn’t my thing, I moved on to something a little closer to my heart: 80’s television logos. I love the combination of minimalist geometry and brutal synth chords for many of these id’s. Perhaps it’s because I was a child of the 80’s that I’m fond of them, but perhaps it’s something else. Perhaps they’re just awesome.
I decided to create a couple of my own…
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The first was a little bit too ‘American flag’ for my liking, but other people have preferred it. I’m arrogant enough to think everyone else is wrong, so I’ve gone with the latter for now.
Interestingly/annoyingly, exporting these via XFL didn’t work too well. For some reason XFL won’t save elements as vectors from After Effects and the rasterising looks a bit rubbish in Flash. I’m able to save files as XML instead, but Flash doesn’t seem happy about opening them in a snappy manner. If anyone can point me in the right direction, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
Hey sorry not as geeky as you so no advice about file formats, but I do enjoy where you are going with these animations. I’m with your arrogant self; prefer the first one, although it feels a little quick and smooth to be an angryPixel.
I’m also interested to know about your font choices. The script feels a bit out of place. But wondering whether there is a conceptual reason for this?
The word ‘angry’ has been a difficult one to deal with. It obviously represents a fairly intense emotion, so I tried to take some of the emphasis away from it by using a softer font. In a strong font, it simply overwhelms everything else. I’m also hoping it expresses a slight sense of humour by using what would at first seem an inappropriate typeface.