3D Animation and a Book Trailer

March 12, 2012 By: Christopher D. Eldridge Category: Technology

I’ve been neglecting posting on here since I’ve been busy trying to finish the draft of the first book. Well, at least Hendor’s part of the book. But occasionally when I’m stuck and can’t write, or I’m battling with a temporary bout of self-doubt, I turn to feverishly working on the website. This past week, while trying to reconfigure the first chapter, again, for about the one thousandth time, I was finding myself annoyed, angered, and a bit of depressed, so I had to step away from writing.

This time, however, I decided to start dabbling with animation. I’ve tried doing flash animation before, but it requires way too much time spent learning, which I can’t afford to invest. So my flash animation never amounted to much.

A month or so ago when I was updating my maps using a cool program called Zoomify, I decided to pick up their HTML5 product. In case you’re not aware, HTLM5 is the new animation platform that is set to replace flash in the future. I really enjoyed working with it, and was able to produce some pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately, HTLM5 is so new, there’s still some bugs to work out, so I wasn’t able to finish my project and get it up on my website. Look for some really cool zoomable maps in the near future.

Anyways, that led me to Adobe’s new animation program (in beta) called Adobe Edge Preview. It’s super cool. I used it to animate a new webpage to replace the main page of my “The World” tab. Again I ran into some quirks, and wasn’t able to get the animation to work in every web browser (Damn you Firefox! You used to be so reliable. Have you been spending time with Internet Explorer?)

Well, after this I decided to do some real 3D animation. So I turned to making a book trailer. Book trailers are the new hot thing. Of course, from what I hear many of them suck. They either make no sense, have nothing to do with the actual book or books, or they’re totally boring. So I set out to make my own promotional trailer with the goal of it not sucking. I hoped it would be epically awesome.

Of course, I knew zero about 3D animation. So I watched some tutorials and spent about 100 hours making my own trailer. It’s not totally finished yet, but here’s my first attempt at real 3D animation with audio, of course. Let me know what you think.

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