Porcfest Cartoon Ad

[dalebert]

I talked to Rich about blog ads for Porcfest and we had this elaborate story line that starts with a porcupine standing amidst a bunch of trash like you see in the first frame. The plan was for it to be a smooth animation that mirrors the old Native American pollution commercial at the start and then leads to the porcupine discovering the FSP and visiting Porcfest. Well, there's no way in Heck that's gonna fit insode 16k, which is the limit. I just barely squeezed these three frames in. The colors are trimmed down to 64. Any lower and the quality goes to Heck real fast. So the storyline is simplified into three frames, basically sad pollution/tyranny, happy porc and clean NH, and then a little text to explain.

What do you guys think of it? I'm planning to go ahead and do a more elaborate animation for YouTube. Then if he wants, Rich could embed that video on the page where the ad links to. The idea is to catch the viewers attention with this ad and hopefully get them to click it for more information. That's about all we can do with that much space. I might be able to manage some minor changes, but anything that involves more frames in the animation is prolly not going to fit.

[flaherty]

i like it. think i'll be adding that to my site tonight...

is that the final draft or should i wait?

[Puke]

I like it.

[dalebert]

i like it. think i'll be adding that to my site tonight...

is that the final draft or should i wait?

I don't see any harm in posting it. You could always update it if it changes. Make sure you cause it to link to the porcfest website.

http://www.freestateproject.org/festival/

[KBCraig]

It's nice, but I didn't know there was a tear until you mentioned the "crying Indian" reference. Even when I watched it through, I found I had to make myself notice the tear.

Cartooning is about finding clever ways to make your point obvious at a glance. I think you need a bigger tear, or at least a way to draw a lot of attention to it.

But other than that technical critique, it's a good cartoon.

[Puke]

I had no problem noticing the tear and getting the reference.

The last frame should read "Now it's pay back time!"
Then we see the Porcupine kick some Viet Cong ass!

[dalebert]

It's nice, but I didn't know there was a tear until you mentioned the "crying Indian" reference. Even when I watched it through, I found I had to make myself notice the tear.

That's a concern I had when I realized I wouldn't have many frames. The original intent was to start off focused on the trash, pan up to see feet, have something get tossed into the pile at his feet, and then pan up to the porcupine and zoom in so you can see the tear, which would mirror the original ad much better. There just was no way to do that with 16k. I thought I made the tear pretty big but since it's a cartoon, I could prolly go even bigger and put little bit of a reflection on it to make it look more globular.

[dalebert]

The last frame should read "Now it's pay back time!"
Then we see the Porcupine kick some Viet Cong ass!

Are you sure you're not Evil Muppet?

[Kat Kanning]

I like the ad.

[dalebert]

I've updated the ad. It's in the same spot on the FTL wiki page so if yours looks the same, reloading the page should refresh it.

Rich wanted the text to be a little simpler on the last page. I didn't implement it exactly as he suggested but I tried to get the information across with just a couple lines of text instead of three lines and the ampersand (&).

[Kat Kanning]

added to nhunderground wiki