Just finished an animation. Had an idea this weekend and it was just short enough to pull off in the remaining two days of the long weekend. The result is below.

Description: Obama and Mccain go head to head on their vice presidential selections.

WARNING: includes juvenile humor.

Update: I posted this rather quickly this morning but I just wanted to add a few notes of credit. My wife reminded me that this idea probably germinated from seeing this fantastic piece on health insurance companies about a month ago. The idea of starting some political animations was spurred on by a good friend and animator, Josh Carrollhach.  I rushed to complete this idea before the end of the weekend, but we may be doing some more new animations in the weeks to come.

The rapid production of this piece was possible, in large part, due to a couple of Flash extensions. One is a tool that I’ve already posted for public consumption, Queasy Tools. The other is one that I currently have in progress which is very similar to Animonger’s AnimSlider, but it deals strictly with frame labels. My lip-syncing process is heavily borrowed from Chris Georgenes’ lip-syncing technique in Flash. This new extension allows me to easily use frame labels (or comments) to navigate a graphic symbol and change mouth or eye shapes. It requires no extra setup, other than adding some labels. I’ll be posting that some time in the near future. I’ll likely make a video tutorial to show it in action as well.