Hi,

So I'm a Ph.D. student creating a flash-based program for children of divorce ages 11-15. The program is close to being done and one of the things I'd like to start adding in is little bits of very basic animation to some of my swfs that are a little dull right now (they just have text and audio reading that text).

The animations would be pretty quick 5-15 seconds and should be very basic but I'm hoping that they'll have some personality and character.

I'm hoping to pay about $25 per animation and I'll probably need about 20-30 animations.

If you're interested you can check out the first part of my program at

http arbiter.asu.edu/vcc/jb/index.php

The first two swfs are movies, the third is an example of one where I'd like to add the first three animations (probably in the white area below the text but anywhere that doesn't have text would be fair game).

If you're interested you could reply here or send me a private message.

Thanks for your time and any helpful comments would be much appreciated.

Jesse

http://arbiter.asu.edu/vcc/jb/index.php

Well, I'm not nearly the best here but I'd be willing to give it a try since you need 20-30 animations.

So what kind of animations do you want? This forum focuses around violent stick animations (probably not the best for your site) but we're all capable of something different.

Please describe in more detail on what you'd like, I couldn't tell from the site.

Thanks for the response and interest unDagada. That's exciting, I wasn't sure if I'd get a response.

As for the animations, I think creativity is probably much more important than the technical quality. The more personality the animations have the better.

You're right that the violent animations (dripping blood and shots through the head, etc.) wouldn't be right for the program but I'm thinking that the basic things that are done in those animations (stick figures walking around, interacting with a minimalist environment, and making faces) are a pretty good match for what I'll need.

So anyway, to be specific, take the following text from the program

How we feel guides what we do. That's one of the things that feelings do for us: they help us know what to do. Just like when pain makes you pull your hand away from water that is too hot, when we feel bad about something we are reminded to try to do things differently so that we can feel better.

I could imagine an empty white background and our little stick hero waltzing up to a big pot of boiling water, or a steamy bath or something else, having a facial reaction and then scrambling back away from the hot water.

I think the useable space will pretty much be an L shape with the vertical area being 150x600 pixels and the horizontal area being 600x200 pixels (probably the horizontal space will be more useable). Right now that area is just empty white space. Oh, and in case it's important, the swf is set to 30 frames per second.

I think it would add a lot of character to the swf.

Is that specific enough? I'm definitely happy to answer any questions about this, I'm really excited about the possibility.

Thanks again,
Jesse

Quote from boringjesse

Thanks for the response and interest unDagada. That's exciting, I wasn't sure if I'd get a response.

As for the animations, I think creativity is probably much more important than the technical quality. The more personality the animations have the better.

You're right that the violent animations (dripping blood and shots through the head, etc.) wouldn't be right for the program but I'm thinking that the basic things that are done in those animations (stick figures walking around, interacting with a minimalist environment, and making faces) are a pretty good match for what I'll need.

So anyway, to be specific, take the following text from the program

How we feel guides what we do. That's one of the things that feelings do for us: they help us know what to do. Just like when pain makes you pull your hand away from water that is too hot, when we feel bad about something we are reminded to try to do things differently so that we can feel better.

I could imagine an empty white background and our little stick hero waltzing up to a big pot of boiling water, or a steamy bath or something else, having a facial reaction and then scrambling back away from the hot water.

I think it would add a lot of character to the swf.

Is that specific enough? I'm definitely happy to answer any questions about this, I'm really excited about the possibility.

Thanks again,
Jesse

u seem to be a person of creativedy are u not or are u i say ur a person of creativedy like look in outside the box cause the key to make in a great movie isint ease or soomth ness all thoue those thing are important but i doesnent matter if u dont have creativedy to make one so i agree with what u said im not the best ainmator and all but i do have creatvedy (yaa right now i have no idea of wat im saying) but i do agree with u

Quote from boringjesse

Thanks for the response and interest unDagada. That's exciting, I wasn't sure if I'd get a response.

As for the animations, I think creativity is probably much more important than the technical quality. The more personality the animations have the better.

You're right that the violent animations (dripping blood and shots through the head, etc.) wouldn't be right for the program but I'm thinking that the basic things that are done in those animations (stick figures walking around, interacting with a minimalist environment, and making faces) are a pretty good match for what I'll need.

So anyway, to be specific, take the following text from the program

How we feel guides what we do. That's one of the things that feelings do for us: they help us know what to do. Just like when pain makes you pull your hand away from water that is too hot, when we feel bad about something we are reminded to try to do things differently so that we can feel better.

I could imagine an empty white background and our little stick hero waltzing up to a big pot of boiling water, or a steamy bath or something else, having a facial reaction and then scrambling back away from the hot water.

I think the useable space will pretty much be an L shape with the vertical area being 150x600 pixels and the horizontal area being 600x200 pixels (probably the horizontal space will be more useable). Right now that area is just empty white space. Oh, and in case it's important, the swf is set to 30 frames per second.

I think it would add a lot of character to the swf.

Is that specific enough? I'm definitely happy to answer any questions about this, I'm really excited about the possibility.

Thanks again,
Jesse

Thanks, that's very specific. I'll be glad to help you out with this, I'll send you an email with more details.

I too am interested.

Do you have MSN?

If you do, feel free to contact me at rusty_spoo0ns@hotmail.com , but I don't check that account for emails.

If you haven't got MSN, I'll send you an email myself

Scarecrow,

Great, I'm really glad you're interested. Even before I made my post I noticed while I was poking around the site that you are well respected on SPP and so I checked out some of your animations and I liked them a lot.

Unfortunately I don't have MSN so it would be great if you could e-mail me so we could talk about the details.

boringjesse, you may want to contact someone like Stone from FA. He is an animator that has been trying to commercialize his skills, and something like this would be just what he would be interested in. Stone is very well respected, is very high quality in his animations, and even knows some things about commercialization, so he would be suited for making animations to help enhance a project like yours. He is the owner of Fluidanims, so you should be able to check out how good he is pretty easily.

I dont meant to steal an opportunity from you scarecrow, I just know that Stone is very dependable.

That is true. Here's a link: http://www.fluidanims.com/FAelite/phpBB3/memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=2

Quote from -Hawk-

Hehe, yea, and he animates fast so he won't waste too much time for this "paid" project. PRO TIP: Stone will never do it. ^_^ O, and dude, 25$ is like... nothing. I'd rather sell post cards.

That's not exactly true. If I were better I'd do it for free. But stone is very busy all the time so maybe you're right.

Hehe, yea, and he animates fast so he won't waste too much time for this "paid" project. PRO TIP: Stone will never do it. ^_^ O, and dude, 25$ is like... nothing. I'd rather sell post cards.

Yeah, I could do it. I'll even do it for free :]

Thanks everybody for your comments. I'll try contacting Stone, it can't hurt to try.

For what it's worth, I wish I could pay more than $25 per animation. Since this is my dissertation, I'm funding the whole project out of pocket and so I have to be really careful with making the most of what I have.

The overall plan is to offer the site for free to any child of divorce once the program has been tested to make sure that it actually helps, I won't try to make money off of the program. There are about 1 million new children of divorce in the U.S. each year and they are about 3 times more at risk for mental health problems than children from intact families. The program will be the first online prevention program for children of it's kind (with highly interactive elements and a structure designed to keep them involved with the program), so if it works it could really help guide future programs.

Fortunately, my mentor, Irwin Sandler is one of the big names in divorce related interventions and actually in prevention science in general and he has great connections with the court system so if the program works I think I'll be able to bring people's attention to that fact.

I realize the money isn't necessarily a great reason to do this project, but it's the sort of thing that's probably best done for love rather than money anyway.

Still, thanks Hawk for the heads up that Stone probably won't be interested.

Sorry, didn't see MaxZ's post.

@MaxZ: Great, I'm glad you're interested. No need to do it for free, I'm happy to pay what I can.

I'm trying to figure out now which animators will work best for the project (looks like I'll probably use multiple people). Do you have any interest in creating a sample of how you might animate a scene for that first bunch of text in the 3rd swf in the link that I posted earlier? (if that's kind of unclear, the program has a linear format so if you go to that link just hit the green continue button twice, the first swf without a video is the one I'm talking about)

I will have a go at animating something quick for an example, of course the dimensions can be fixed later.



Oh, and, sorry if I'm nitpicking here, but the green "Im ready to move on" button needs an apostrophe ;/

@ Scarecrow

Great! I'll forward to seeing that and thanks for the edit suggestion. Nitpicking is always welcome since it just makes the program better to know what errors are there.

I'll get to that fix eventually.