Inkscape to Flash 8

These days, if at all possible, I like to use Inkscape for creating vector artwork. At one time I used Macromedia Flash 8 for all my vector illustration work. But these days, if I have to create artwork in Flash it makes me feel like I’m being forced to write with my left hand.

There are also a number of things I can achieve easily in Inkscape that are harder to do in Flash. One recent example was when I was working on the animated menu for Simon Buckley’s new website. I was given a signed off design as a bitmap illustration and was asked to turn the design into a vector animation in Macromedia Flash format.

Most of the design was very straightforward to achieve, but there was one part that was more fiddly. The name of the website was written in a font called Chalkdust, and it was fringed with a thick black outline. This is one of those things that looks simple to do until you actually try and do it in Flash.

The way I tackled getting an attractive vector outline for the Chalkdust text was to enter the Chalkdust text into Inkscape, turn the text into vector outlines and then use the Inkscape “Linked Offset” option to enable me to expand the text outline to the desired extent.

 Cleaning up Chalkdust in Inkscape

Chalkdust, like most typefaces, has very messy vector outlines with large amount of redundant nodes. This meant that the resulting expanded outline needed a lot of cleaning up and simplification – a job I could do very quickly with the node tool in Inkscape.

It’s always worth making your vector outlines as clean as possible.  In the old days of dial-up modems this was because you hand to shave every last byte off of download times – I used to hand optimise everything I did in Flash to get Flash animations within bandwidth quotas set by customers. However these days it’s because the more elegant your outline the better it looks (due to the vagaries of anti-aliasing routines) and the better it animates.

Cleaned up outline

The finished outline was soon cleaned up and ready for transferring from Inkscape 0.47 to Flash 8.

After some experimenting, I found that my favoured method of transferring vector Inkscape artwork into Macromedia Flash 8 is the Encapsulated Postscript or EPS format.

There is one important thing to be aware of when transferring between the two programs using this format. Take this Inkscape vector drawing as an example – it’s 400 by 400 pixels in size.

400 x 400 pixel Inkscape drawing…

When imported into Macromedia Flash as an EPS it arrives as a vector drawing 320 by 320 pixels in size.

…becomes 320 x 320 pixel Flash drawing.

There is absolutely no way around this – Flash thinks EPS files should be 72dpi, Inkscape thinks EPS files should be 90dpi and neither program lets you do anything about it.

However, it’s simple enough to use the Flash 8 Transform panel to scale all the EPS files you import into it by 125% to make up for the difference in dpi between the two packages.

Doing this becomes automatic after a while!

One final point to bear in mind with EPS transfers between Inkscape and Flash 8 – avoid gradient fills. These always seem to be imported as bitmaps in Flash 8. You will have to recreate any Inkscape fills again from scratch in Macromedia Flash so I never bother creating them in Inkscape in the first place.

The finished animated menu can be seen here. I’ve also written a blog post about my preferred method of getting my vector drawings from Flash 8 into Inkscape here.

Lolly Sticks

Another day, another video of a rather lame mock uploaded to YouTube. We’re back to 4:3 again, and a short video a did to teach myself how to use Adobe Premiere Elements:

Before I bought Premiere Elements in early 2008 I’d never done any video editing before, so it was all very new to me. I did huge a number of videos to experiment and work out a good workflow to transfer my material from Flash or Fireworks to video. I recorded my work over and over again onto the same DVD-RW and then scuttled downstairs to the television to see how the results looked on a CRT television rather than an LCD monitor. As you can see from this video, I hadn’t yet worked out things like interlacing or how to age transparencies properly.

Although the first BBC 1 globe symbol I remember from my childhood was the black and cyan version with the italic “COLOUR” lettering, the first BBC 2 symbol I remember was the striped cylindrical 2. I saw this countless times waiting for Play School on weekday mornings or Play Away – the strange oasis that appeared between boring black and white films – on Saturdays. BBC 1 and ITV were showing wall to wall sport at the time due to their regulatory obligation to provide programming for the hard of thinking. Channel Four didn’t even exist. Play School mornings were usually accompanied by a cup of Mellow Birds made with milk. Despite being Julie Steven’s favourite beverage, it never seemed to dissolve properly back then, so you’d get little brown bits on the top…

When the computer generated ==2== symbol replaced the cylinder on BBC 2, I never really took to it. The cylinder’s animation was far more interesting, so I often wondered what would have happened if the stripey cylindrical 2 had been kept but updated. The end result, my “lolly sticks” symbol was created in Swift 3D. The animation does a very similar thing to the cylinder – the coloured stripes rotate in opposite directions – but to make it more interesting the camera does a 270 degree trip around the stripes as they do so.

Swift 3D – click to enlarge

One interesting thing about the lolly sticks symbol is that I created it at 400 x 300 in Swift 3D. As I was exporting it in vector format as a .swf it didn’t matter what size it was so long as the aspect ratio was 4:3. Vector 3D is something that Swift 3D really excels at, although it’s very good at raster 3D as well. After more experimentation I’d later scrub this approach in favour of working at 720 x 576 and correcting in advance in Swift 3D itself for non-square PAL pixels.

Thin hairline 2 in Flash

To get the striped 2 into Swift 3D in the first place, I drew it in Macromedia Flash 8. I drew it as a series of hairlines, and then turned the hairlines into thick rounded strokes.

 Exactly the same graphic, stroked in Inkscape

After doing this, I turned the strokes into fills, and exported the resulting graphic as an Adobe Illustrator file for importing into Swift 3D.

GNAT Flash – Click to Enlarge

The clock is my Macromedia Flash 8 version of BBC Engineer Richard Russell’s computer originated GNAT (Generator, Network Analogue Time) clocks. The GNATs were used by BBC 1 and BBC 2 throughout the 1980s. There was even a rather nice yellow and blue Open University version for a few years. You can download a screensaver created using the final version of the GNAT software from Richard’s site. Richard has also written an article that discusses the history of the GNAT.

Teacher’s discipline problem #5435 – POW!!!!!!!!

The schools dots is again another one of my Flash 8 concoctions. This is the second version, where I finally got the font right! This, along with the clock, is the sort of animation that’s very easy to do in Actionscript, but a real pain to produce a version you can export to use in video projects.

Henry Woolf was even better with Charlie than with Pinter

The slide was based on a BBC1 version I did around ten years ago now for the sadly soon to be defunct BBC Cult website. I simply traced a screen capture in Flash that the BBC supplied to me from the opening titles of the programme “Words and Pictures”.

My treatment of the slide was very unsatisfactory – both in terms of the fading and blurring I used and the very bad banding that appears on the image. It looks very fake indeed, and one day I must get round to writing a post about how I would have gone about doing that job properly.

Just a note about the font – when I’m doing 70s stuff that requires Helvetica I tend to use URW++ Nimbus Sans these days. I’ll explain why in a post about Thames Television some other time.

The music is from one of my favourite programmes – 4Square – and was composed by Ian McKim. The music was designed as a tension bed underneath a computer generated (Acorn Archimedes) maze game and made for a very exciting minute of television.

Anyway, technically a rather unaccomplished little video of another lame mock. But it brings back lot of memories and I enjoy watching it from time to time.

Happy St George’s Day

As I’m English, I thought I’d celebrate today with a video of my choice – my daughter speaking very good English even though she hasn’t been there since she was eighteen months old:

But I suspect people reading this blog will be more interested in the first part of the video.

I’ve been playing with doing more work in widescreen in the past couple of years. The reason is simply that watching pillar boxed stuff annoys me. I always used to hate those letterboxed films they showed on BBC2 for film buffs with magnifying glasses when I was a kid. So as 4:3 televisions are becoming harder and harder to find and I have a 16:9 monitor I’ve been animating everything in 16:9 for the past couple of years – perversely I’ve got DVD’s full of 16:9 presentation I’ve done in Flash from the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Flashy house building – Click to Enlarge

I animated the Playschool house animation from scratch in Macromedia Flash 8 and the BBC 1 South West globe in Swift 3D v5.0 – both at 720 x 576 for use as anamorphic 16:9 in Adobe Premiere Elements. The video was filmised in VirtualDub using the MSU Old Cinema plug in. I hope to have an example Flash animation of some kind filmised using OpenShot on GNU/Linux (I’ll probably be on Fedora 13 by then) to compare this against soon – the options for filmising your work on this look very promising indeed.

The Whole Wide World in Swift 3D version 5

The BBC1 South West globe was animated at 50 frames per second, and I used that to create an interlaced 50 fields per second file in VirtualDub. The colour was keyed on in Adobe Premiere Elements. The announcement is actually Peter Macann (former Tomorrow’s World presenter) and was from BBC1 South in Southampton.

The BBC1 caption was traced in Macromedia Flash 8 from a scan of the original BBC1 globe caption from BBC Graphic Designer Bob Richardson.

The Playschool music (the definitive Paul Reade version) has a voice over from the magical Brian Cant and the day is given to us by Australia’s finest singer, Don Spencer.

Orbituary

I had finished creating my BSB Squarial font on December 16th. It was now the December 17th, the event was on January 9th, Rory hadn’t yet received any BSB material from Kaleidoscope and time was getting short.

So, to make sure I had a fighting chance of getting an ident ready in time for Rory to use, I turned to the ever reliable TV-Ark site. I found some wonderful scans of BSB promotional material that I could use as source material. I started putting as much of this as I thought would useful into Inkscape.

The first thing I did were the channel logos – Movies, Now, Sport, Galaxy and Power Station. Due to the good quality of the source material I ended up being able to produce nice vector versions of these logos in Inkscape.

Five Inkscape BSB channel logos

I also used Google Image Search which sucessfully came up with some other source material I thought may be handy. At the fascinating Vintage Broadcasting site I found a fantastic IBA breakdown caption, which I recreated in Inkscape.

Inkscape IBA/BSB breakdown caption

…and a test card used for engineering tests. Again I recreated it in Inkscape.

Inkscape BSB Engineering Card

Another thing I found was the caption that was broadcast when BSB transmissions on the Marco Polo satellite ceased. Again here’s my Inkscape recreation.

Inkscape BSB Closure caption

It was interesting that they used Friz Quadrata rather than the BSB corporate font for this. I suppose they must have been past caring by then!

Once I’d done all this I sent it all off to Rory in Inkscape SVG format so that he could use or edit any of the files I created if he needed to.

The good news was that Rory had received the BSB material from Kaleidoscope. The bad news was that it seemed to be mainly third generation VHS stuff. This is a nightmare source material for recreation because the VHS format chucks away so much picture detail and colour information that recreating anything from grabs of VHS material is slow, frustrating and largely down to guesswork.

However, Rory did send back ident grab of a BSB logo which was very handy, and which I duly recreated in Inkscape. The letters are a bolder weight of the BSB font than the one used in the caption below it, so I drew them from scratch.

Inkscape BSB logo

The coloured ring in the BSB logo is quite interesting. To do this I created a coloured background that was made of a red, yellow, green and blue fills overlayed on top of each other and grouped into a single object.

Inkscape BSB logo with the ring mask unset

Then I created the shape of the ring, and used that as a mask over the coloured background.

My final port of call was Mike Brown’s excellent mb21 site. The mb21 site contains an extensive library of scans historical documents related to UK Broadcast transmission. What I was after was the famous BSB testcard complete with the girl who won the newspaper “be a the satellite test card girl” competition.

I created the testcard with a green circle in the centre in place of a photograph and a Kaleidoscope logo in place of a channel logo. The green circle was so that Rory could key in whatever he wanted.

Inkscape BSB/Kaleidoscope test card

Once I had done this, and sent it to Rory I had done about all the still images I usefully could so I couldn’t delay doing the animated ident in Flash any longer. I still had no audio too, but I decided I’d start creating an ident anyway and hope for the best.

After Channel 4 burst onto the scene in 1982 with its famous CGI blocks logo there had been a glut of shiny plastic and metallic 3D shapes whizzing about the screen in television presentation. That meant that by the time BSB came along just seven years later that sort of thing was all old hat. What was now in vogue was creating lots of soft fluttery layers of images on top of each other with subtle lighting changes.

This actually suited me, as I don’t have my copy of Swift 3D here in Hungary with me, so I couldn’t have created something very three dimensional anyway (although if I had had Swift 3D my finished BSB ident would have been much nicer).

The brief from Kaleidoscope was to create an ident with the BSB logo and the legend “The Quest Continues…” underneath it. Obviously thoughts of space and Star Trek and Dr. Who came to mind.

“The Quest Continues…” text would be easy – I’d simply zoom it into view with a trail Tyne Tees 1979 stylee. Clichéd, naff and typical of me…

Tyne-Tees style text zoom

For the background I used a nice picture of Pleiades star cluster that I found on Wikipedia. I’d used this before for a Rediffusion Christmas ident that I’d recreated for Transdiffusion. You can see it below, behind the Rediffusion ad astral logo – you’ll probably have to click on the image below to see it.

Flash 8 Rediffusion Xmas recreation

One of the things I wanted was to make a nice form-up of the diamond shape around the BSB logo that represented the BSB “squarial” receiving dish. I also wanted to make this a bit kaleidoscopic, in honour of the fact that the ident was being done for Kaleidoscope.

I decided on the simple device of making the sides of the box zoom in with coloured trails using Flash motion tweens.

I did an early test with solid colours – and this looked all wrong. It looked like a 1970s cel animated ident.

Rather 70s…

However, with some gradient fills and some alpha transparency it suddenly looked all right.

What a difference a fill makes…

Rory sent some audio and a genuine BSB Galaxy ident – this was handy because I hadn’t actually seen any real BSB presentation at this point.

I realised that I needed to make the ident longer, and I also needed to add some more elements to layer it a bit more and make it a bit more “Lambie-Nairn” than “Lamey-Dave”. I came up with some ribbons accompanied by Galaxy-style five-pointed stars.

Animating the ribbons in Flash

These were simply animated using shape tweens (shape morphs) in Flash. As well as tweening the shape of the ribbons, I anmated the gradient fill inside them to simulate the lighting effects. I used primary and secondary colours rather than the subtler shades that Lambie Nairn used as I wanted to get over the idea of “television”.

Completed ribbons layer

Again, drawing the ribbons in Macromedia Flash 8 was a horrible job and every second of doing it made me miss Inkscape terribly. Using Bézier handles in Flash 8 is fiddly and unintuitive and I can’t believe how much work I actually did using them!

I could have used Flash 8 Professional filter effects in my ident, which would have allowed Gaussian blurs, compositing effects etc. and made the end result both more pleasant to look at and created an effect more faithful to the genuine BSB idents. However I decided against this as if I had relied upon them and Rory couldn’t import them his end we would have been stuck. I didn’t have time to post him a DVD of an exported video file from Flash.

Rory, as always, immediately spotted what was wrong with my ident and added some beautiful stars that slowly moved towards the viewer, which made all the difference to the finished product. And here it is:

The finished BSB “Quest” ident

I’m really, really pleased with the way the finished ident turned out. My comfort zone is doing material from the 50s, 60s and 70s so I was really dreading doing a job that was supposed to evoke the late 80s. So to get anything approaching half-decent was a huge relief.

Karmic Tablets…

I’ve wanted a graphics tablet ever since I watched a pretentious little series on BBC2 (Painting With Light, 1987) where artists such as David Hockney were given the Quantel Paintbox to play with for an afternoon. They all produced a load of bobbins, but it looked such fun.

My interest was rekindled when a former colleague of mine, the multi-talented artist David “Peanut” Paramore used to bring a graphics tablet in to work with him a few years ago. The sort of work he produced with it was (and is) incredible and I really wanted to have a go at using a tablet for myself.

So, for Christmas this year, I was delighted to finally receive a Trust TB 5300 graphics tablet.  Even after I asked my parents for this, I wasn’t actually sure I’d be able to use the thing with GNU/Linux. I had visions of having to take a crash course in C and X programming in order to get the thing to work.

I needn’t have worried – the nice thing about the GNU/Linux world is that its users tend to blog about getting unusual bits and bobs working on the operating system, and this was no exception.

A blog called “Dick’s Open Source Life“, which is written by Dick Thomas, came to my rescue and thanks to this blog post I have the Trust TB 5300 working on Ubuntu Karmic Koala very happily indeed.

Both Inkscape and The GIMP work fine; even pressure sensitivity functioning as expected. I didn’t even need to callibrate the tablet as it worked fine out of the box.

In fact, the tablet even works properly when I’m running Macromedia Flash 8 via WINE.

Thanks once again for your help Dick!

You Have Been Watching…

As you probably know if you come here often, recently I’ve been helping out my friend Rory Clark by doing some graphical odds and ends for three documentaries he was making for the “Bob’s Full House” Kaleidoscope event at BAFTA.

One of the things Rory asked me over the phone was whether I could knock him up an endcap for the documentaries that would credit his company “Farcical Films”. Rory was quite firm over the phone that he wanted something very, very simple and didn’t want any animation.

I was equally firm that I wanted him to have some animation as I thought he was being far too modest and thought he needed to blow his own trumpet a bit more.

So what I came up with was a bit of a compromise – I would do him a little silent animation in muted BBC Co-Production endboard style.

In actual fact I already had an animated ident for Farcical Films that goes back many years that never actually got used for anything and I thought it was about time it got dusted off and used.

In the distant past I was living in the village of Mélykút on the Hungarian/Serbian border and watched an awful lot of Croatian (HRT) and Serbian (RTS) television. This was because they showed many English programmes with subtitles whereas in Hungary they dub everything – badly. I got quite familiar with their presentation, and one of the RTS idents back then started off with EBU colour bars and resolved into the RTS logo. As a television presentation fan I thought this was fantastic idea, and definitely worth pinching.

So I created a “Farcical Films” ident using this idea for Rory. It was also an learning exercise for me in Swift 3D, which I had just started using for the first time. Swift 3D is an incredible program that creates vector 3D, and can export in .swf format. It also features a number of nice features to make very small 3D images which are excellent for web work, and also a number of options for “cartoony” 3D for 2D animation use. I used it for many jobs over the years and if you’ve never used a 3D program before it’s an excellent one to start with due to its ease of use and high quality of its documentation.

I started with what looked like colour bars, but were the Farcical Films letters arranged in a line end on.

I then animated the letters into place, whilst making them white.

I finally faded on the word “FILMS” to produce the Farcical Films logo.

As Rory obviously wanted something more muted, and so that Kaleidoscope got their credit too, I created something a bit more BBC.

K logo starts formed, Farcical films logo starts as bars.

The bars animate.

And the logo is revealed.

I speeded the ident to double speed so it would run at 50fps. This meant that both the animation was short and sweet (under 3 secs) and that Rory could interlace the animation to get smoother movement, which is something he is always keen to do when possible.

G Spots

While I was producing a title sequence for the “A Shower Of Shot” documentary, Rory Clark asked me if I would also produce some little animations that would appear in the documentary itself.

Rory had decided to break the documentary into sections, with the title of section being a word beginning with the letter g. He asked me if I would produce a few seconds of animation that would introduce each of the sections. He gave me a list of words “girls, gifts, gags, gaffes, etc.” and let me get on with it.

I started by creating all the words Rory gave me in Inkscape, and exported them all for import into Macromedia Flash 8 as .eps (Encapsulated Postscript) files.

Why don’t you build yourself a word…

My first idea was a bit too elaborate; I got carried away, which I often do! I produced an apple on a gradient background…

…that gets hit by a bolt coming out of a crossbow…

…smashing the screen…

…and revealing the name of the section underneath.

Rory gave me a bit of much needed direction and said he simply needed the word “golden…”…

…which would then be hit by a bolt…

…you’d see a flash…

…and with a quick shudder…

…the title of the section would be revealed.

Another thing Rory asked me to do was a breakdown caption. One of the things he remembered about watching “The Golden Shot” as a child were the breakdowns caused by technical difficulties, strikes or IRA bomb threats. These were the joys of live television in the 70s.

Obviously there was no argument about the style – Rory wanted an HTV holding transparency in the style we both remembered from the seventies which was handy as I would have probably given him one of those anyway! I selected a suitably naff publicity shot of Bob from a selection Rory sent to me and recreated in Inkscape what we would have seen in Wales and the West in the case of one of the aforementioned catastrophies.

The polyester clad stars of Wednesbury Co-op cheese counter…

Another thing Rory asked me to do was to add, for technical reasons, a few seconds of grey onto the beginning of the ATV Colour Zoom. Whilst I was happy to oblige, I suggested that he might also like to add this:

A fitting place to finish, I think.

I created it by tracing the caption that appears on the front of a telerecording of the last Golden Shot Bob presented in 1972 after he had been sacked for no reason whatsoever by Francis Essex. I used Inkscape to create the entire caption –  I couldn’t face drawing something as fiddly as this in Flash anymore! I must be getting old…

And with that, my work on the “A Shower Of Shot” documentary was done.

A Shower of Shot

Now I’d produced my “Monkhouse” font, my next job was to produce a caption using it. The Monkhouse font needs to be used very large to be legible, so the ATV graphic designers merged the letters together to give themselves enough room.

I also love the fact that the words are not centred.

I looked at the example above and noticed that the outer two outlines were fused together. By putting my letters over the ones in the screen-grab I worked out that the fourth outline of each letter should overlap the third outline of the letter to its left.

To do this letter fusing I used Inkscape and the letter outlines I’d drawn to import into FontForge. I used them rather than the true-type font simply because they were already the right size. I did this fusing a letter at a time, left to right. First of all I’d overlap the letters.

Overlap the letters

Then I’d merge the two outer outlines using the Inkscape Path Union feature. After that I deleted the areas of the merged path I didn’t want. The quickest way to do this was simply to draw a rectangle over an area of the overlap…

Rectangle over the overlap

…and then use the Path Difference feature….

Path Difference

…and then tidy up the paths using the Nodes tool.

And Bob’s Your Uncle

Then I’d do the same thing again for the second outline in.

Here’s the finished caption in Inkscape:

The end result.

After Rory OK-ed the end result he asked if I wanted to have a go at animating a title sequence for him. I said I would, provided I could get Macromedia Flash 8 to behave on Ubuntu GNU/Linux (I don’t have a copy of Windows). WINE is a very clever piece of free software that allows programs written for Microsoft Windows family of operating systems to run on the GNU/Linux operating system.

I already had WINE installed so I tried installing my copy of Macromedia Flash 8 and it worked perfectly. The only problem was the lack of anti-aliasing on some of the smaller fonts used on the interface and some of the keyboard short-cuts I liked using not working.

The next problem I had was how to export my Inkscape design into Flash. After doing a few tests the best format to use for the Inkscape to Flash 8 transfer seemed to be Encapsulated Postscript or “.eps”.

Now I was sure I could do something useful in Flash I got back to Rory and asked him which music he wanted to use. Rory quite rightly sent me back a copy of the late sixties/early seventies theme that was used for the longest amount of time. However, there was something missing – I wanted the “left a bit, right a bit, fire” that I remembered from my childhood. I suggested Rory cull it from the start of the final season’s title sequence.

I wanted to include this because I wanted to add the iconic ATV Colour Zoom logo at start of the sequence and have Bob smash it to pieces with a crossbow.

First of all I traced the bolt and bow from the final season titles – this was a very easy job as the shapes were quite simple. I layered a few gradient fills on top of each other to get a kind of “airbrushed” effect.

Running on GNU/Linux? That’s Flash…

Then I needed to smash the ATV logo to pieces. The first thing I needed to do was break apart my ATV logo in Flash so that it was all one symbol on one layer with no groups. Then I drew a “crack” shape on top of it. Finally, I turned the pieces inside each bit of the “crack” into separate symbol so I could animate them.

Lady Plowden did this too…

Although it’s very simple it worked quite well. As far as the titles themselves were concerned I wanted to copy the final season titles with the bolt setting off on a journey with concentric rings of airbrushed items giving an impression of movement.

This is what I wanted to copy…

One of the items I needed to borrow from those original titles was, naturally, an apple. Tracing the apple in Flash was an absolutely horrible job, and reminded me how lucky I am to be able to draw things in Inkscape most of the time. I decided not to draw the apple in Inkscape as I had no way of getting the gradient fills from Inkscape into Flash – they come across as bitmaps in all the formats I tried. This was no good as all of the objects I drew had to change size dramatically in the finished animation so they really had to be totally vector shapes.

Looks sweet, but rotten to do.

If you’ve never watched “The Golden Shot” you may not know that over the theme music an announcer says “…Live, from Birmingham…”. To illustrate the “from Birmingham” part I wanted a ring of ATV logos to appear. That was simplicity itself. But for the “…Live…” part I wanted to show the reason for the program being live – a telephone. “The Golden Shot” was a program where viewers at home could phone in and play.

In the later seasons of “The Golden Shot” a gold plated Trimphone was used, and I just had to have a trimphone in the titles as they are the essence of Britain in the seventies. I found a website with pictures of trimphones and I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know the trimphone I used as reference material was one of the series designed by Lord Snowden.

Something beginning with T: Trimphone – lovely!!!!!

Finally, I wanted to have a postcard, as viewers writing-in was an important part of the programme too. I used my Queen’s head and stamp perforations I’d designed many moons ago to use on a recreation of an ITV Schools and Colleges interval transparency. Anyone familiar with Bob’s life story will understand the significance of what’s actually written on the card.

And I want them served on that nice silver cake stand…

Sadly I currently don’t have access to the fantastic Swift3D here in England – I left my serial number in the UK and you can’t export without it. If I had, I would have used it to realise one of Rory’s original concepts for the title sequence.

What he asked me to do was to make the “O” rotate when it is hit by a crossbow bolt so that it looked like an “i” when it was on its edge so we got a shit/shot gag on the main title card. In fact, if I had had Swift3D I would also have recreated the wonderful psychedelic silver tube effect from the 1972 title sequence as well – it truly has to be seen to be believed.

Converting .ai files from Flash 8 to .svg

This morning I wanted to use a number of the graphics I have done in Flash in Inkscape.

The .swf and .fla files are stuck at the moment until I have access to a copy of Flash, but I also have a large stock of .ai files. I exported them from Flash 8 to use in Fireworks, which allowed me to use various raster effects on my vector artwork.

Inkscape would only import Adobe Illustrator 9 files, but Flash 8 exported .ai files in Adobe Illustrator 6 format. However, the solution was already available and installed on my computer with Inkscape. It just needed a bit of “command line love” (as they say on the Ubuntu UK podcast). The program in question is a command line tool called Uniconvertor, and it’s very easy to use.

Open a terminal, put the .ai files in your Home folder, and type:

dave@dave-desktop:~$ uniconvertor source.ai destination.svg

Very, very useful.

Starting Science credits

Here are the finished filmised “Starting Science” credits, which I discussed in my previous post here.

After animation was created in Macromedia Flash 8:
  • the .swf was loaded into Premiere Elements 4.0,
  • gate weave was added using the Active Camera filter,
  • the video was exported from Premiere Elements as an .avi using the HuffyUV codec
  • then imported into VirtualDub
  • the VirtualDub blur filter was added
  • the MSU Noise Generator filter was added
  • the MSU Old Cinema filter was added
  • the video was exported from VirtualDub as an .avi using the HuffyUV codec
  • the video was turned into a .flv using the Flash Video Encoder (OnVP6 codec)
  • the video was uploaded to YouTube.

The credits are silent, as I don’t want to upset Ron Geesin, but with music it’s fantastic!