Callidus

Well, its like…a month overdue, but my new animated manip is online!

This one had a long road to completion. The actual animated frames I’ve had finished for months now, but I knew I didn’t want to just have four individual animated manips that would force the viewer to go forward and backward through browser pages in order to view each panel. That, of course, meant I needed to learn some flash.

Or more precisely actionscript, which is the programing language that drives flash. Animation I can do, but even simple user-interaction (like Next and Back buttons) takes some programing. So early this year I decided I wasn’t going to let my lack of programming knowledge hold me back anymore. I bought a book and started teaching myself how to write flash applications.

It seems almost silly, all this work for what amounts to a slideshow, but such is the nature of my illness. I’m a perfectionist you see; not always in a healthy way. Its not enough to do something, it has to be done right. Also, I’m a hopeless control-freak and know-it-all; if I can’t do something myself I get cranky.

But enough of my problems.

The point (finally) is that it took me a while before I had the programming skill to put together the interactive part of this latest manip (and truth be told I still leaned heavily on some handy online tutorials). Plus there was that whole “lets completely redesign the website” thing right as I was finishing up.

So, I’m very glad to have the new site up and running and very, very glad to finally have this new manip on display for everyone to see. As we’re all beginning to discover, I’m an Aria Giovanni…uh…enthusiast. I’d had a pic set of one of her few fetish video shoots and after looking at them for a while, finally figured out where they could go..with a little Photoshop.

The source pics required some extensive work: duplicating and blending large sections of foreground, head replacement, logo removal, and I still had to fabricate one side of the head clamps from scratch. The large “Enable” button was a 3D model dropped in from the Google warehouse, then textured and lit in Photoshop to blend into the background.

The visual fx were really inspired by an episode of Hart to Hart where a neferious hypnotist uses light bouncing off a crystal chandeler to put Jennifer under. Its a really neat effect and I sort of used that as my jumping off point. The subliminal text and images were added at the eleventh hour when I realized I had more story than would fit into three panels, and decided to insert a POV shot of what Aria is seeing.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Time to enter The Room.