Album Covers

*http://www.alexsteinweiss.com/as_index.html

*http://www.amazon.com/Apathetic-EP-Relient-K/dp/B000BM7YK6

The music business was revolutionized in 1923 when Alex Steinweiss invented the concept of Album Covers. The first album cover is a painting by Alex Steinweiss himself. The second is from a contemporary band Relient K. I find there are many aspects represented in each cover that remind me of one. I find the covers polar opposites; the industrialized city of Steinweiss' versus the natural environment of Relient K's cover.

The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round

This week in our Digital Media lab I began to work on my flash animation. I have drawn the bus and made the wheels turn. I also elaborated about a dog riding the bus. Instead of it being ordinary pet animals, I have started drawing giraffes on the bus. I drew a cow on the bus. I am going to draw a bear on the bus. I think the end of the story will be resulting in the animals proclaiming, “A child on the bus? How unusual!”
It took me a long time to understand how to make the buses wheels rotate while making the body of the bus not. I didn’t realize I would need to make a separate layer for each wheel. This was the biggest obstacle this week while using flash. I now understand how to make the wheels rotate.
I also thought drawing on flash with the brush tool was going to be more challenging. Flash seems to assume your drawing edges and then creates soft-edged lines. This looks much more smooth and professional than my usual jagged drawings.

FLASH!

This past Sunday, my bus ride home from work happened to be a tad more eventful than the usual routine. Seating myself I noticed the older gentleman in-front of me doing the daily crossword, the red-haired women to my left gazing out the window, the teenage boy behind me shuffling songs on his Ipod and one middle-aged woman sitting surrounded by bags. Reaching the next stop a third woman and her dog got onto the bus. I have never seen a dog ride the bus before and hid a smile, as she brushed past. All of a sudden the bag woman and lady with her dog started screaming at one another. The bag woman was complaining about the dog being on the bus while the other woman was yelling back in defence. While both women were still shouting, the dog smelt the ground around him and we arrived at the next stop. A little boy with freckles jumped excitedly down the aisle then realized there was an animal. Stopping in his tracks, eyeing the dog up and down, he then pro-claiming, “A dog on the bus? How unusual!”
It is this bus ride that I am going capture in my flash animation. I plan to create a flash video, which tells the story of a child watching different animals ride the school bus.
In class we watched an example of a video using text and music. This has inspired me to use text and computer-drawn graphics to tell a children’s story. I am going to have to draw many graphics for this animation and add layers of text and music. I plan for the story to be read, not told, so I won’t have to record someone reciting the animation’s text. I am going to use different motion tweens and rotations to make the buses wheels turn and move along the road. Maybe I will have the animals do different actions if you place the cursor over them. For this I would have to use the button application.