Download " Farmyard Critters", one of the first animated films... for cellphones.

Hey ya'll,
I finally got the new animated phone cartoon completed.It has 3 one minute long episodes along with some ringtones, basic graphics, and a xml generated news section. Pretty basic stuff, but it works. There were a lot of bugs pertaining to getting the controls to work reliably with the phone's key configurations, but it works now. It is now ready to be downloaded from my site. I made a new flashlite section so you can see what other interesting prototypes I'm working on.You can download it here.
Make sure and scroll down to the 2nd flashlite example- the one with cartoon characters in it. You can play it on your desktop one piece at a time or if you happen to have a newer Symbian OS phone, then you can drag the entire folder into your phone's memory. You will also need the flashlite 2.0 plugin for your phone. The current phones in the US market that will play FL 2.0 are Mostly N series Nokia phones, as in N70, N90, and the following Symbian equipped models: 3230,6260,6620,6630,6670,6670,6680,6681,3382,7610. If you don't have one of these phones... then you cannot play it on your phone. Again, this technology is less than 6 months old, so unfortunatly there aren't many phones that will play it... yet. So for now, perhaps some of you will see the amazing potential this new medium has for animators. I plan on making a number of test pilots for cellphone users.

wa=hahahaha! best site in the whole wide world!

What?! Two posts in a week? What the hell? Actually, I'm inbetween starting a new job, so I have extra time to waste. Anyhow, I've been going to this awesome site for months now. It is the opitomy of perfection when it comes to wasting time. I even made a few things for it. The site is called ytmnd.com which stands for: "Your the man now dog!"- a quote that may seem obvious to some of you Sean Connery fans. The movie it came from is "The Rock". The site started as this spoof of that phrase and originally just had a stupid placeholder image of Sean Connrey pointing a finger with audio in the background; " your the man now dog!" over and over. A lot of people liked it so much that others started making equally stupid pointless sites with animated, not to mention tiled background sites with sound bytes and all. So many people made these in fact that ytmnd got turned into a portal where people can submit their own sites.
Over the years, there have been dozens of really random themes that get reused over and over again. To the unititiated, there is no reasoning behind any of it, so it looks totally ridiculous. But if you do some searches for specific themes, you'll see what I mean.

Try these when you go: lol, chunk is indestructable, N64 kids, N*gga stole my bike, clubbin' baby seals, and lastly- NEDM.

That last one needs explanation. Basically, NEDM stands for:" Not Even Doom Music would make this funny. It spawned from this rather disturbing video some kids burning a cat. Someone posted " Not even doom music would make this funny" and thus the term: NEDM was born.

Anyhow, most of you are probably working away like good little animators, but if you happen to read this, I highly reccomend it.

A link to one of mine: http://crapspinnermachine.ytmnd.com/

my personal favorite: http://wheredidyourhoveroundtakeyou.ytmnd.com/

Flashlite stuff

No.. not flashlights... flashlite. Looks like my fellow fafers come here once a year now, so perhaps next year they'll see this post. For the rest of you who come here, well I have something kind of fun I've been working on. Flashlite cellphone applications. Why is this so cool? because flashlite is a version of the desktop version of flash that enables animators, designers, and UI builders to create custom games, movies, applications, and interfaces for cellphones. This means that if you can animate in flash, you can animate for cellphones.
The biggest diffrence of course is that the file sizes are restricted due to the current lineup of phones that play flashlite, which at this writing are very few in the US, but quite common on Asia and Europe. The animation must also be somewhat simplified. No long motion tweens or cross fades. Just simple animation. That said, the latest version, flashlite 2.0 is amazing. You can now load videos, music, xml text, images, and web sites remotely or from a folder structure... just like conventional flash will. Flashlite also works with the hotkeys and numeric keypad on your phone. You will also need to get very familiar with structural loading limitiations in the phone's memory. At this time, phones do not have what is known as an automatic " garbage dump", or what is known in javascript as a method to unload data from device memory. Flashlite will do this automatically, but you should still keep the files smaller and hence not crash the phone, which is easy as hell to do the first couple of times you make something.
So far, I've created a number of prototypes that will play cartoons in small epirodes of about a minute each, fully animated,with sound and somewhat detailed backgrounds. These episodes load into a main menu similiar to what you might see on a DVD UI. I've also made a few apps that have updated remote text, images, and simple chat applications. I'm not a programmer, so as you can see, the technology is very accesible.
What does this mean? well... put it this way: there are going to be literally several BILLION handheld wireless devices in the next decade compared to the several hundred million desktop computers, and equivelant number TV sets. This means that developing entertainment for cellphones,though still in very early stages, has the real potential to become far more reaching than any other media source.
If you haven't jumped into mobile content development yet and know how to use flash, then I'd suggest learning the stuff, and learn it NOW! the demand for this will be enormous in around a year or 2.