Invisibleman » animation

Introducing Muggmaker

keegan — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 05:10:56 +0000

This post has been a long time coming! In fact, part of the reason I have been neglecting this fine website has been to focus on finishing the project about which I write.
I’m proud to announce the release of Muggmaker. I have been working on Muggmaker for over two years on and off. It started as a little Flash file in my “flash lab” folder on my computer and has grown into something much bigger.

Over the years, alongside my freelance illustration career, I have also been working at my other job as an interactive designer for WSJ.com. I had spent so much time writing Flash applications at my day job, yet I never had attempted a project that applied all that code to something that was all about illustration and animation. So in my spare time I kept jamming away at this make-a-face experiment, and kept evolving it.
At a certain point, I realized that I could also include all of the database stuff I had been doing, by making a full-fledged service out of the app, that would allow people to save their faces, and share them with anyone. So I slogged away building Muggmaker to be a web application with all the “Web 2.0″ trimmings.
Enter Facebook. As I worked on polishing Muggmaker, Facebook got more and more popular. As of July 2009, Facebook officially claims north of 200 million active users (though it’s rumored to be more like 300 million users). I knew I had to have SOME sort of hook into Facebook, but at a certain point, I decided to just go all in.
So now Muggmaker has been launched as a Facebook Application (I will launch a regular web-only version in the near future as well). You can make a Mugg, animate it, and share it with your other Facebook friends. You can also export a JPEG of your Mugg which you can use on anywhere else. It’s been fun watching the first users make Muggs of each other, and celebrities.
So if you are on Facebook, please head on over and check out Muggmaker. If you like it, I’d love it if you could write a review, and become of fan of it as well.
Below is a quick video tour so you can get an idea what it’s all about…I’d love to hear your feedback, and I look forward to seeing your Muggs!
Link: Muggmaker on Facebook

painting on the iPhone

keegan — Thu, 28 May 2009 03:49:25 +0000

In honor of the mindblowingly cool move The New Yorker made this week by running one of Jorge Colombo’s awesome iPhone paintings on this week’s cover, I decided to delve back into the Brushes app, which Jorge used to paint his cover illustration.
One of the coolest features of Brushes is the ability to download “.brushes” files from your iPhone via wifi and load them into the companion Brushes viewer program on the Mac. The .brushes file isn’t just a flat image, it’s a data ‘recording’ of all the strokes you made AND it’s resolution independent, so you can render the image out at up to 6x the iphone’s 480×320 resolution. And you can render out movies of your painting coming to life.
Jorge now has a regular weekly spot on The New Yorker’s website to post his Brushes movies. Pretty damn cool…
So here’s a movie of a painting I did of some bearded dude (sorta 300 Leonidas I suppose)..Enjoy!

Anamatic for Minus Zero

kurt — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:10:33 +0000

this a mock-up of an animation i’m working on.

Power Players

Paul — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 17:08:59 +0000

This is an illustration done in flash for a Wall Street Journal Online infographic highlighting the big business behind superhero movie franchises. It was really fun to work up some old friends in a comic book style, though I was lobbying for Hellboy to be in there rather than the ninja turtle. Alas I was overruled. Jon Keegan and Mei Lan Ho-Walker worked on the awesome animation and design aspects of the infographic. Check out the handywork here (Safari’s popup-blocker might thwart this link).

Mad About the 50s

kurt — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 18:51:33 +0000

Gobble gobble

keegan — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 21:31:35 +0000

TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">

This is an old animation I did for the Outdoor Life Network a few years ago. They used it as a little animated bug that ran across the bottom of the screen during Thanksgiving week programming promoting some turkey shoot show.
Happy Thanksgiving!

as art

bz — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 02:35:58 +0000

day 1. here i am in lovely aspen. here’s an image (still) from some randomly generated art (dynamically via action script) which i did today. the color palette resulted from this ink drawing/image (previously shown on invisibleman a few months ago) and then refined in photoshop.
PS i saw the milky way tonight. awesome. highly recommend it.

Animated Illo

keegan — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:00:33 +0000

I just completed this illustration for The New York Times (Thurs. April 20th, Style section), dealing with women and A.C.L. (anterior cruciate ligament) knee injuries.
The reference came from Eadweard Muybridge’s classic “The Human Figure in Motion”, which is an invaluable resource for how the body moves.
I couldn’t resist whipping up a quick animation of these nine frames from the illo.

Pixar at MoMa

keegan — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:30:25 +0000

Whoa. PA and I walked out of the Pixar exhibit at MoMa today (Thanks Susannah!) fully humbled, delighted and inspired. There was so much to take in…I’m at a bit of a loss. All I can say is MAKE SURE YOU SEE THIS SHOW! It goes untill Feb. 6, so you still have some time to catch it.
Some of the highlights: The gorgeous, glowing pastels by Dominique Louis; Lou Romano’s unbelievably luminous / slick / tight gouache paintings; the flawless grey resin macquettes of all your favorite Pixar charcters (especially Violet and Mr. Incredible’s different expressions)….and then there’s the zoetrope.
There aren’t many words that I could use to convey to you the sheer delightful joy you will experience when you lay your eyes on the spectacular Pixar 3D zoetrope. Once it starts to spin, and the strobes turn on, you will giggle with joy and you won’t believe your eyes. It is a miracle of illusion, motion and animation. Possibly the highlight of the show. Go now. And by all means get there early. This show gets mobbed and you should really see this with as small a crowd as possible.
Pix by : mnemo, fudj and hseikaly .

Seagull

kurt — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 10:41:25 +0000