The scene clearly demonstrates the power of 3d animation in conveying a large amount of information in a short space of time. Court reports are generally commissioned by solicitors or insurance companies and can be forty pages long or more. They are based on many documents including witness statements, physical evidence, terrain maps as well as weather conditions, lighting conditions, road surface and visibility information. Calculations and analysis are made based on the laws of physics and applied mathematics. It is the job of the 3d animator to portray this analysis as accurately as possible.

The ability to place multiple cameras in the scene is a huge advantage of 3d accident reconstruction. Once the mechanics of the scene have been built, driver’s eye views, witness views, overhead views, moving cameras can all help to illuminate the situation.

As the name suggests, everything we have created for this new online shop is insulting, that is, it’s a small compendium of quotes designed and laid out on T-Shirts, mousemats, mugs etc and utilises some of the greatest putdowns of all time.

Queen Karaoke is responsible of course, and those of you who follow her Twitter account will already know the savagery of her wit. But there are also famous quotes from Groucho Marx, Oscar Wilde and others, and a section devoted to Shakespeare’s greatest insults.

Visit Insults By Funhouse Graphics and prepare to be insulted.

Whatever happens, animation on the web is here to stay and if there’s a better way than flash of incorporating moving elements I’ll be working with it soon. In the meantime, flash is still very much alive and well.

I could show you lots of examples of flash banners that I’ve made but they’re a bit meaningless outwith the context of the websites they belong in. Instead here is my favourite piece which is a little front page insert I created for Internet Karaoke, the online karaoke player. Queen Karaoke is the site’s ‘virtual hostess’ and the purpose of the animation was simply to tell customers they had to purchase credits before singing along. However, beyond the simple instruction to ‘Get Credits’ I decided we could have some fun.

This is the new website design I created for Scottish painter Carolynda Macdonald. Carolynda has a serious eye for detail and her most recent paintings, such as the one above, have featured blown-up images of individual pieces of candy with every fold mouth-wateringly portrayed.

The website design is extremely simple and lets the paintings speak for themselves, but I think provides a sympathetic backdrop for these very strong images.

For more information see Carolynda Macdonald.

There are a hundred ways of making maps, and apparently last year they did it with Powerpoint slides, but this year I created these animated 3d flythroughs for them, complete with fluffy clouds.

Overnight their share price soared by 8%. I reckon it was the clouds that did it.

The technique involves manipulating time by accelerating and decelerating speeds in various ways on specific bits of footage. The shots here are unedited and I’ve just included various clips that I liked. Obviously these were rendered in high definition and are meant to be viewed on a large HDTV screen and not in a miniscule browser window, but you get the idea.

Sadly there’s no way of actually slowing down time in real life.

Bob Jamieson developed the ‘Superpuck’, an ice hockey puck with a tiny electronic chip inside (currently shortlisted for a John Logie Baird Award for innovation). The technology clearly had implications for other sports and is now attracting interest from FIFA, the international governing body of football. See the Superpuck website for the full story on Goal Line Technology.

The idea of the 3d animation was to show in under a minute what it could take ten minutes to communicate verbally, and to a potentially non-English speaking audience. The three elements involved are clear – the electronic chip, the sensor strip around the goal and the decoder box. Watch this space.

They had fairly set ideas about the design style – that it should be monochromatic, gritty and urban – and even had some animation examples to show me. This was a bit unusual, but what was more unusual was that they didn’t want me to use their existing logo.

An ident without a logo was not something I was sure I could do, but I enjoy a challenge.  Like other idents, you only use around 5-10 seconds worth but when they gave me the music they were using – by Mike Jameson – I kind of liked looking at the whole thing.

Scottish painter Alan Macdonald asked me to design the catalogue for his current exhibition, now on show in Amsterdam, entitled ‘Message From The Dark Side’.

Alan’s paintings show bishops on mopeds, Dutch masters drinking Coke and all manner of other surreal juxtapositions. I’m a big fan. One of my favourites is called ‘Windbag’ and shows a classical landscape with a Tesco bag blowing freely in the centre.

The catalogue was an exercise in graphic design restraint. The images are so strong, they need a lot of space and as little interference from other design elements as possible. I kept it really simple. I’m not normally known for my restraint.

See Alan Macdonald’s website, also a Funhouse Graphics design.