Artoonix

Into the gallery I posted a short experimental movie called 'To dream of the stars'

http://www.artoonix.com/UploadedFiles/flyme.avi

There are two features of this which some users might find useful:

SOUNDTRACK
The weird sountrack was created by using a converted midifile of the tune 'Fly me to the moon'. After the conversion (which was done with 'Midi2Wav'), everything else was done inside the excellent sound-editing functions of Artoonix. A section was isolated which featured the most familar section of the tune. This was done in such a way that the edited section was substantially shorter than the duration of the movie. The rest was deleted. 'Speed change' was then used to slow the whole segment down until it spanned the length of the movie. I then copied and duplicated this section several times, but made each duplication run slightly out of step with the others. This created a strange 'hollow echo' effect. I then exported a mix of all tracks and deleted all the separate soundtracks. After importing the mix-down, I ended up with one track of the main tune + echo effect. Lengthy fade-in and fade-out sections were used so that only the main 'riff' came through at full volume.

The next stage was to load a new track of the main tune (slowed down, but without the echo or the fades), where it was reversed. The volume levels of both tracks were then adjusted using trial and error until I got the effect I wanted. In the final edit, you hear the weird reversed sountrack throughout and the main tune fades in and then out to give you time to recognise it.

VECTOR GRAPHICS
Despite recent improvements, Artoonix drawing functions have definite areas of weakness. One of these is the fact that when using both Translation and especially Deformation, the integrity of lines can be lost and they become pixellated and/or blurred. Vector graphics overcome almost all of these problems. This little movie demonstrates that difference. The first sequence of shape-shifting when the 'blob' appears was done by creating 31 vector-drawn shapes which were saved as separate images. These were then imported into Artoonix. For the drawing I used a free - but not brilliant - program called LIVESWIF. After Frame 31, I used Artoonix's own Deformation function which was fine until I started to extrude the 'dog's' nose and head. That's when you see the way lines lose their integrity and they become blurred.