Man en Kerel in Zone 5300

Nu in de winkel, nummer 96 van Zone 5300, met Man en Kerel strips plus een kort interview!

Bicof 2011

If you happen to be in Korea this week, go visit Bicof (the Bucheon International Cartoon Festival). There’s an exhibition called ‘Smartoon’ about digital comics, where my work is shown along with work by Scott McCloud and Daniel Merlin Goodbrey.

Eiland 5

The new Eiland has been printed! Published by Fremok, 220 fullcolor pages in french!

And here you can find the first online reviews: du9.org, laccoudoir.com and chronicart.com.

Man & Guy

These two are my favorite characters from my book CHRZ. They deserved a comic of their own. I tried to translate this very short comic to be read/viewed on a screen. No animation, just trying to control the pace of reading. Showing panel to panel (but not losing the overal page view).

Read it here.

MP3Pitch.as with loop function

For Astronaut & Isidore (also see this post) I wanted to control not only the volume of a sound, but also the pitch. Since this is not supported (yet) in Actionscript, I searched and found this great class made by Andre Michelle: MP3Pitch.as. But because I wanted to use short sound effects I also wanted the sound to loop, which was not supported. So I changed it a little (now you can also start and stop the sound more easily). You can download the version with my additions here.

Be careful not to start too many sounds at the same time (three sounds already slowed down my computer), since every sound  has its own SampleData stream. (If you want to do this I think it is best to rewrite the class and mix the different sounds into one SampleData stream.)

Another interesting software library to manipulate sound with is Antti Kupila’s SoundFX library, which makes it possible to add different kinds of filters to an MP3.

Astronaut and Isidore e-book

I’ve added sound to the Astronaut & Isidore version that you can read in a pop-up book kind of way (also see this post). Now you can control not only the animation, but also the sound by moving the mouse. Also, we translated it to English (we translated it ourselves, so this still has to be improved…)

You can read and play with it here.

Allow to infuse iPhone app

Some months ago NexStudios asked me to convert some of my comics to iPhone. The result can be downloaded here. Because of the small screen what I tried to do is cut up the comics so there is no need to scroll.

Currently at NexStudios they are working on an iPad version of their comics viewer, which I think might be much more suitable for viewing comic e-books (obviously due to the bigger screen of the iPad).

Remco de Waard

Remco’s band The Parlandos has just finished a new CD, you can listen to it on their myspace page. Also, they will be playing live on Dutch radio (Radio 6) on Saturday March 6th (14:00 local time). So check it out!

I’ve worked with Remco on several projects these past years and he always amazes me with his soundtracks. You can check them out by clicking on the Remco de Waard-tag in the categories of this blog.

He also has written music for the Eiland website (website of the very irregular comics magazine of me and Tobias Schalken) and the trailers of Tobias’ book Balthazar and my book CHRZ.

Astronaut and Isidore

Astronaut and Isidore is a children’s book that I’ve made together with Simone Ruitenbeek. I’ve tried to convert the book to flash in two different ways:

Here you can see it as an animation. Voice over by Hans Ruitenbeek (only in Dutch…). The intro music is by Remco de Waard performed by the Parlandos.

Here you can read it in a pop-up book kind of way. By alternating the position of the next button on the left and right side of the page, you have to cross the page to go to the next page. The path you need to take between the buttons (with your mouse) controls the animation. I’m working on an English translation.

What I like about the animation is the music, the pop-up version seems awfully silent after watching the animation, so maybe I have to add sound to the pop-up version (maybe sound effects that are also controlled by the mouse like the animation). I think I prefer the pop-up version though, because it’s more like the book, plus you can play around with it.

Oh, and by the way, Simone and I are still looking for a publisher for a ‘paper’ version of the book, so if you have any suggestions…

The Leader of People

The Leader of People was the first comic (click here to see the comic) in which I tried to keep the flash conversion more like a reading experience. Which basically means all you can do is click on next. This might sound a bit boring but what I find interesting is that this allows the reader to have his own pacing/rate of reading. Just like reading books or comics. I think this may well be the most important difference between animation and comics.

I’m experimenting right now with how to utilize this in the best way. With The Leader of People I tried to add soundeffects to enhance the atmosphere of the story.

Click here to read.