notes: weather.com ad requirements are that the filesize has to be below 75k, so, obviously, the challenge was, how to take a 268k quicktime animation and reduce it to a 67k file. Export every frame as a PNG file, import into flash, delete the non-critical frames, render the remaining frames as outlines, and then do some SERIOUS cleaning up of those outlines. I’m still not 100% happy with the final result - I’d anticipated something much cleaner, but I suspect that the next one will be better. I’ve learned a TON through this process.
Thanks to EVERYONE who helped me with all my annoying questions… please don’t kill me when you get this ad if you visit weather.com. And those of you NOT on PCs, you’re in luck, you wont see this ad.
I WILL tell you that the product is a great product (Desktop Weather) that sends weather information to your computer so you don’t have to visit weather.com all the time. Okay there. I’m done with the obligatory marketing plug.
Congratulations, beau! This is great news, for you personally, as well as for Blender - the Weather Channel!! Very cool. It will be the first ad in a long time I’ll be looking forward to see
wont go on mac os YET. It’s because IE is so crappily implemented - so - for once, it’s to your advantage that Macs are the re-headed step-children of software developers.
Good graphics. I can’t bring myself to say good job, because yes, I hate those things. But its a living, I know. I’ve worked for a company doing “direct marketing” myself.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for at least NOT making it STAY in your face and in the way until you hunt down the blasted CLOSE button (don’t get any ideas, either!), and its mercifully brief.
Out of morbid curiousity, I presume the new versions of Flash (or IE?) allow you to open up a new window, but you create transparent border and background colours so that it doesn’t look like a rectangular “window”? I can’t view the MOV right now, but I assume the backdrop is black or has an actual alpha channel.
Actually, the out of banner ads exploit a bug in IE. (so, for that, I spose, they DID get it right on the MAC).
It’s done with layers. The preview I posted here is all flash so I can send it around to Mac users for their approval. But to run the real ad, you set the window mode to transparent, then put the swf in a layer on top of the page.
And, yeah, since I design all in-house ads, as well as a lot of ads for our clients, I’m a HUGE proponent of a 10-second time limit, the close button, the “don’t cover the whole damn page” rule. I got lots of rules that I TRY to make all other clients abide by. Because yeah, I agree with you, I’m not a big fan of MOST of these types of ads either.
Heh. In fact - at the interview for this job, my (future) boss starts the interview with “you know those ads that run on top of the web page?” to which I laughed and said, “yeah! I HATE those things!!”
And yet, he hired me. Go figger.
If it’s any consolation, we’re now working on keeping those types of ads down to a minimum when you come to the site, so you’re not hit with an SUV running across every page.
I love my job. Where else would I get to play with 3D software, flash, dhtml and javascript, illustrator, photoshop - it’s like I’ve grown up and get to stay in the arcade!
hey - we’re just from totally different backgrounds, that’s all. Me, I played videogames a lot when I was a kid - no - wait - I’d bet that’s where we’re all similar.
I was an artist in high school and went into design long ago. The programming part didn’t come until 5 years ago. The 3D stuff is just a small part of my job - a very cool small part.
At least there’s some cross-over these days, so I get to do a BIT of art.
I thought about going into some kind of design or something (maybe drafting) in high school but after seeing some of the “competition” I figured I’d better stick to something else :-
Maybe I’ll develop enough skill to make it eventually - I do like both. Taking a general art course now. Time is the problem. Oh well.
After high school, I went into insurance claims processing for 10 years - no art at all, until I started designing posters for my band…
and then the insurance company laid me off. I took the severence pay and bought a mac.
4 yrs later I went to design school (at 30). So - don’t sell yourself short - in high school I thought there was no chance I’d ever be a designer cuz of the competition. Years later I realize it’s like anything else - you can do it if you just GO DO IT.
