Monday, February 28, 2011

Meerkat motion!

I did a practice at moving my meerkat puppet around and inserting that into a video, keying out the background.

I have to say I am pretty thrilled with the result.  There are still some problems you can see in the video ( a bit of green popping up, he runs a bit floaty, my silly hand popping in) but most importantly it all works!  Now I just have to iron out a few problems, do some planning and then I should almost be ready to start working on the welcoming sequence.

Video is below (you have to wait a few minutes for the videos to load, be patient)

Sunday, February 27, 2011

new stuff

I decided to take a break from the irritating action script for a while and work on some other elements of the project.  I finally busted out the materials I have been collecting and did a test run of some stop motion I would like to use in the flash videos.  I will probably only use stop motion sequences for a few bits, like the opening welcome and a few other spots.  I was able to take the video below and put it in flash as a movieclip (it seems that it will only work right if it is an FLV).  I can still apply other layers and all that.  

So I will build those sequences in Premier.  I also have made a puppet of the meerkat with 6 points of movement and interchangeable facial features!  I will probably do those stop motion sequences over a piece of green poster board, key out the background, and then add that video in seperately.  Coordinating the puppet with other backgrounds could be a bit of a challenge, but I am fairly confident it will work.  

It was nice to get away from code and hunching over a computer for a while!









Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Sending email out

I have got the code right to send an attachment out from a server using PHP.  It was pretty simple really.

All I have to do now is figure out how to save an image from my flash movie onto the server and it is proving to be much more difficult.  Actionscript continues to suck hours away from my life.
I'll see if I can find a better example than the one I am using now but the comments say this is a good one.  It is just the way the author intertwined a bunch of his class files.  It is very frusterating and I am getting a class location error and I cannot find a reason.

But I did get the php part working so little progress there.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Oh, hey! it's mid-term.

Spent time this last week trying to get the e-mail working.  We actually spent nearly 2 hours of class time figuring out how to get it done.

originally, I was using this code http://designreviver.com/tutorials/actionscript-3-jpeg-encoder-revealed-saving-images-from-flash/
But that was not quite working.  The reason we figured was because the PHP was not actually doing much of anything but trying to echo the JPG created in flash.

Now the working theory is that I should have the actionscript create a JPG or image that will be saved onto the server.  Then I will create some php that will take that image and send it out to an email.  Easy as could be right?

here is a big ol' collection of links.

http://ntt.cc/2009/01/09/as3corelib-tutorialhow-to-use-jpegencoder-and-pngencoder-class-in-flex.html

http://www.php.net/manual/en/intro.imagick.php   or also try GD?

http://email.about.com/od/emailprogrammingtips/qt/How_to_Send_Email_from_a_PHP_Script.htm



http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4635820/as3-save-media-file-to-server

http://ask.amoeba.co.in/save-images-from-flash-actionsctipt-3-filereference-save-jpgencoder/

http://www.quietless.com/kitchen/upload-bitmapdata-snapshot-to-server-in-as3/

http://www.webcheatsheet.com/PHP/send_email_text_html_attachment.php#attachment






_________________________________________________________________

So over mid-term I will hopefully get that working over break.  I also plan on improving things from a visual point of view over the week. 

*fingers crossed that things work well enough.

Friday, February 11, 2011

feedback from presentation

Feedback from presentation:
The presentation itself was just fine and dandy.

As far as the project goes, though, I am behind where I should be.  At this point all that tough stuff I am working on now should be done and I should be putting effort in to other things like the graphics and layout and putting the whole darn thing together.

My project is also at risk of being "middle of the road."

I am sorry to say that I do not completely disagree with this.  If I can make the thing look nice and make everything work I think I will be happy with it all.  But yeah.... we shall see.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Still getting printing right

Working away.

So I got it printing, but I only wanted it to print a specific movie clip.  It took me a couple days to get that right, but today I got it.

Unfortunately, I found that my drag and drop code was only dragging objects on top of the movie clip.  I will need the objects to be dropped inside of the movie clip.  I worked on this for a while and have not gotten it yet.  So i'll hopefully work out how to do that tomorrow.

Anyway, the actionscript continues to be a challenge every step of the way.  I am hoping that I am getting better as I go.  I can only assume I am.  I also hope I am not just making a big mess.