As I’m a bit pissed off not to have any of my most recent work on my online book, for confidentiality reasons, I decided to create a Happy New Year animation for this website, similar to one I recently made for my work. And to stay in this blog’s “guidelines” I explain how it’s made. You have certainly seen that on the internet, on the biggest portals, advertisement has changed. You now find transparent flash animations which push boundaries, jumping out of the frame which is normally dedicated to them and covering the whole page, which you can still see behind them, for a few seconds. Some people will be annoyed by them, as they already are pissed off against advertisement which they would like to get rid of. But graphically speaking, I find it very interesting to be able to jump out of the frame in such a way.
Since Flash 8, it is possible to add videos with an alpha (transparent) layer on a website. It is not used much and doubles the weight of these videos, it requires you to have a recent flash version, and it takes a lot of computing power from your computer. But you can that way get some nice effects with software such as After Effects, which you cannot create in Flash, even though since its eighth version it has brought up a lot of new features (blur, blending modes, halo, shadow…). The banner you see on this website (if you have Flash 8) is made that way. Hover over it with your mouse pointer in order to see more…
I hope you will like it. Happy New Year 2008 !
Briac Pollier

Note: considering the time of year I have deleted this banner