2d art, animation, miscellaneous havoc.

[Bombsfall]

Artist : Scott Benson
Site : crashstudios.com (http://crashstudios.com)

I've been doing art and animation for 3 years professionally, mostly for web and broadcast but I'd love to cross over into games, as they are a huge passion of mine. Check out the reel and drop me a line if interested. My prices are pretty low and I do this full time, so reliability isn't so much a worry. I'm open to vector and pixel art requests, and very soon I'll have some newer 3d modeling to show. For now I'd appreciate paying offers, but I might be swayed to do some free-ish work by an especially cool project. Thanks for checking me out and I look forward to being involved around here!

[GnadeGames]

I absolutely love your stuff and style. Hope you got my PM.

[Pyabo]

Your site insists that I don't have the Flash player installed. Which of course is definitely not correct. Wonder how many other people can't see it...

[Bombsfall]

Your site insists that I don't have the Flash player installed. Which of course is definitely not correct. Wonder how many other people can't see it...

Holy geez, I'll have to talk to my web guy. Heads will roll.

[Sysiphus]

I can see it, I have Flash 9 player installed in firefox.

A robot animation, and after animation ends, then i can see the link to reel (maybe is better to put it before, while people understand what they have to do...otherwise may look as there's nothing else...probably)

Also, the reel is in MOV format...for some reason (Am usually able to watch mov embededs) it displays a weird screen of first frame, and the crashes firefox and all open tabs... (I mean, big firefox crash..) .IE is also crashing.(strong crashes, aplication breaks fully)

You for sure wanted to know (but please, no heads rolling, the general interface is very nice, there's just some tiny prob)

Also, you may want to use FLV flash video format instead of a mov, which tends to play no probs, fully stable, and you can do with Flash 8, or with a free tool like riva encoder, or my favourite, a comercial one very very cheap , called Flix Standard, there at on2.com (am unrelated to them) .It so will be possible to integrate way much better in your flash, and playback is way much more stable than pur swf, or the case, a raw mov there in new window.

I have a pair (or more) of very in depth posts about the matter, look for the more recent (lengthy) one, if you ar einterested in the procedure, I think I explained every bit...

edit: for a reel...By all means, and for the matter of not loosing quality, I'd go for On2 flix standard, or Flash 8 flv encoding(I mean, that's what i use inside Flix, I mean inside your Adobe Flash software) if it really does so well (funnily, havent used, I only know that other tool is amazing in every angle) unless you dont mind the loosing of quality, as the codec used by the free other tool ...does have quality loss...of course, if you force it a huge bitrate (but then I recommend a full preload at start...i recommend it anyway, never know how is the connection of the user) , the quality will be good...but we're talking about 30 megs maybe , for 3 mins of video...the flix thing in my tests, same video, 6 -8 megs...in a preload of broadband, largely stablished, that's nothing...

[cliffski]

I just skipped past your site. I'm not after animation, and too busy to sit and see what happens when an unskippable movie ends. I suspect a fair few other visitors in a hurry have done the same. Have a prominent link to a portfolio on the main page.

[Polycount Productions]

Artist : Scott Benson
Site : crashstudios.com (http://crashstudios.com)

I've been doing art and animation for 3 years professionally, mostly for web and broadcast but I'd love to cross over into games, as they are a huge passion of mine. Check out the reel and drop me a line if interested. My prices are pretty low and I do this full time, so reliability isn't so much a worry. I'm open to vector and pixel art requests, and very soon I'll have some newer 3d modeling to show. For now I'd appreciate paying offers, but I might be swayed to do some free-ish work by an especially cool project. Thanks for checking me out and I look forward to being involved around here!

Great looking stuff.

Perhaps you could tell some about your rates here - that might be interesting to know for people on these boards.

[Pyabo]

Well, I definitely had Flash 9 installed already, because this Adobe test page worked OK:

http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/

But the Shockwave content didn't show. So I installed Shockwave. Now that test page still fails for the Shockwave content, but I can see CrashStudio's movie fine. WTF!?!

Incidentally... I'm using Opera... which is probably why it didn't work the first time. But no clue why it's working now. Presumably the Shockwave install changed something.

I have to second the recommendation about changing the format of the demo reel, or at least offering multiple formats. I absolutely *HATE* QuickTime. Will not install it now that Apple has gone and pulled a Real on us. "Oh you want to install QuickTime? Well, why don't we go ahead and install iTunes also! Whether you like it or not."

[Bombsfall]

Wow! I've never heard of the page crashing browsers before! We'll look into it. Has anyone else had this problem?

[Sysiphus]

(maybe is a problem of my system, as others here seem to have seen it directly (I finally downloaded putting the url in a special downloader))

anyway, mov files have more issues, in browsers, than flash videos, though is more work to produce these, depending on the software you use.Seems most of the people is being able to watch it, though.

[MiceHead]

The intro animation made me sit around too damned long before I could navigate to something else, but that's such a great demo reel. Did you have any contact info (e-mail/phone) up that I missed?

[Bombsfall]

mrscottbenson@yahoo.com

Generally this page is used as a reel package sent with my contact info to clients, so a lot of the issues with navigation and such aren't as relevant in that context. But these are some good concerns and I'll look into some page tweaking with my web guy.

[luggage]

If you're going to keep it as a .mov put a proper link in so it can be downloaded. Quicktime just kills my web browser 90% of the time so I usually prefer to download and watch it.

[oNyx]

If you're going to keep it as a .mov put a proper link in so it can be downloaded. Quicktime just kills my web browser 90% of the time so I usually prefer to download and watch it.

Note that Quicktime behaves generally better then any other usual kind of video (mpeg, avi, wmv etc).

However, FLV is still a lot more compatible then that.

I also agree with cliffski. Don't do that unskippable stuff.

[Sysiphus]

Just in case you go for the flv route, and while I totally advice going for the I think 40$ or so, On2 flix standard ( http://www.on2.com/consumer/flixstandard ) , you can do with all free tools using:

- Riva Encoder (to go from avi->flv) :
http://www.rivavx.com/?encoder
but I really recommend save your avi using techsmith free codec: riva wont take every avi codec out there, an techsmith is quite nice as a codec, imo...

-techsmith codec :
http://www.techsmith.com/download/codecs.asp

- Flowplayer (an swf that allows to embed the flv, even interface-less, if you change the *sort of* ini variables) In case you don't know how to load the flv with Flash, or don't have your self acces to Adobe Flash.
http://flowplayer.sourceforge.net/