Hey folks!

So, I've been doing some work creating things with Actionscript 3 recently. I'll start doing something because I'm bored, but then it might turn out to be useful, so I will continue developing it until I can actually put it to practical use. One of these things is a particle system that creates a bunch of "bugs" that follow and swarm around a given point. You can see a demo of it and get the source code for your own use on my website. I haven't actually used it in an animation yet, but it will most likely be in my next one (or the one after that, depending on how fast I finish it.)

Another thing I have been trying to accomplish is an automatic music generator. So far, it has a structured but random drum kit that picks either 3/4 or 4/4 time depending on the selected genre (e.g. rock, jazz, blues). That works relatively well, and it will even put in fills and drum solos. What I'm having slight difficulty with is the melody. My main problem is a technical one: How do I play the sounds? It would seem like too much work to go and make a sample of a whole bunch of notes for a whole bunch of instruments. Does anyone know of a sound library that is relatively easy to work with that is capable of generating good sounds? I tried programming my own, but all it could do was a sine wave, and it sounded really crappy. Any suggestions would be welcomed! :) As for the actual melody-building, it is coming along surprisingly well. It can make chords, play a blues scale, solo, and structure itself into choruses and bridges. It just sounds crappy. But hopefully if I can easily generate the sound with a library, this will be fixed.

Also, you may have seen that I have a new video. Let's Go Fly a Kite was the first of what I think will be two "practice" submissions of mine that I am using to develop my frame-by-frame skills. There are some things that I tried that I probably won't do again, such as the textures on the shirts, pants, and hair. But I do like the "watercoloresque" backgrounds I put in, so I think I will do something of the sort again.

Oh, and one more thing. I came third in the SkillsCanada national competition! It was pretty fun. The people there are cool. Check out Conkertheking22, who came in second, and also happens to be on Newgrounds.

Hey, this is my first news post ever! Does anyone read this?

Anyway. On to business. So I've been doing some cool animation stuff recently. In Canada, there is this thing called the "SkillsCanada" technical competition. Pretty much, people from all over the country (there's a high school category, which I'm in, and a post-secondary education category) go to compete in various skilled trade fields, ranging from robotics to welding to, you guessed it, animation.

What they do for the animation category is this: They give you a theme, a tablet, a microphone, some headphones, and a Windows 7 computer equipped with various software, and then they stick you in a room for a grand total of five hours (and feed you pizza every once in a while) so you can make your movie. Yup, that's five hours total. You are forced to stop after that.

So, in case you didn't know, I'm a high school student in Ottawa. So, my friend and I (we needed a team of two) got together to try this out. So, we first went to Kingston, Ontario for the regional competition and we came in first. Then, earlier this week, we went to Waterloo, Ontario for the provincial competition, and we won there too. By the way, here's the movie we made in Waterloo:

The theme was "Where am I?" and although they were supposed to supply us with legit music and sound effects, they didn't, so we had to make our own from scratch in Audacity using the "generate tone", "generate white noise" and a few other effects (which is time consuming and doesn't actually sound very good, by the way :P). But now we can officially say that we have bragging rights as the best high school animators in Ontario.

So, since we won, we're going to Quebec City at the end of this month for the national competition, where we actually get a full TWO days to make the movie instead of one!

I'll post some more updates after the fact!