Oh Boy!

So for you boys and girls out there that haven’t quite found your way through the magic door into animation land, Webmonkey.com has put up a rockin’ tutorial that covers the basics of Minivid. If you’re still stuck at the threshold - interested in animating, but not sure if you can - this tutorial shows you exactly how easy it is to make a cool animation.

If you’ve got some questions left over after running through the tutorial, head on over to our forums and ask away. Someone from our “Crack Team of Forum Posting People, Who Love You” (CTFPPWLY for short) (probably Chris or Ryan) will be there to give you a helping hand.

Thanks Webmonkey! We love you guys as much as we love ice cream. And, oh man, do we love ice cream.

Until next time, remember kids: coffee grinders are not for putting in microwaves. (that’s what bad, 80’s hair metal CDs are for)

Hey there boys and girls of the inter-social-webs! Fuzzwich has joined the microbloggin’ fun on Twitter. We’ll be posting a healthy helping of tech updates, insight into the lives of Team Fuzzwich, and a boatload of user animations that we just love.

Feel free to follow along at Twitter.com/Fuzzwich

Now: You, Animate!

Some changes are upon us. For example, Minivid now features a cat. And that’s not all!

More importantly (arguably), you can now create a portfolio, which is Fuzzwich lingo for an account. Your portfolio is a showcase for your work. It’s your very own digital emporium, bustling with wide-eyed tourists, struck dumb by the masterful craft of your animated wares.

Once you’re a certified portfolio owner, you’ve got all sorts of options. Meet fellow fuzzwichers, make feature demands, and interact with your childhood idols (assuming that’s us) in our space-age internet forums.

Or you may choose to unlock fresh-squeezed bonus characters. These first two are easy to get, because you deserve to be happy. In the future, special content will be unlocked with points. “Points?” you say, leaning toward the screen, gripped with excitement. Why, yes. You earn points when people like your animations, and also when you do more or less anything else on the site. Points will also do things like get you into private betas (hint hint) and get you free merch.

If you used Minivid back when the page looked like three tall buildings, your old accounts have been moved over to the current Portfolio system (you’ll have to reset the password though). Holler at help@fuzzwich.com if… well, if you need help I guess.

As always, feedback is hugely appreciated. Let us know what you think. And if you’ve been enjoying your time here, spread the Fuzzwich word. Thanks very much for your wonderful support and witty talent. Hugs.

Sometimes you just gotta dance.  Or give flowers.  Or pull out a huge automatic weapon and rabidly fire away. Thanks to the hard work of Rob (programming) and Laurence (art),  Minivid just got a really exciting upgrade.  When speech bubbles and movement just aren’t enough to express your creativity, the Minivid cast now has a plethora of animated actions (get it?)  to really liven up your animation.  Check out the action centric Minivid below.

Actions work very similarly to speech bubbles.   Select an actor, press the    button,  and choose the most enticing action.  Just like that, the action is added to your Minivid and will playback right on cue!

We’re really excited about the options actions bring to the Minivid table.  And even more so, as always, we are really looking forward to the creativity and genius of the Fuzzwich community to take actions in all kinds of unique directions.

So stop reading and take action!
Don’t leave without some satisfACTION!
Be sure to create a thermonuclear reACTION

Ok. I’m done.  Really.

Have fun!

This last week saw the re-debut of Fuzzwich Minivid.  As the creativity slowly starts rolling in,  Fuzzwich would like to highlight the past week’s best creations.

Loopt by LukeXI

We don’t need no water by Crazy

Disturbance Report by Pug

We moved.  Again.  This time we find ourselves in the Mission area of San Francisco.  The move was a little more comfortable than the last, probably more long term than Palo Alto, and thankfully did not involve any hotel stays.  We even have more than one room for our  “office space” and a futon in the kitchen to boot!  You can see Chris and Laurence working hard in our new “office space” below.   It’s quite spacious no?

But here at Fuzzwich,  just changing our location wasn’t enough.

While the Animator approaches a more public beta, we decided to push out the accompanying new site.  Why change the site, yet again? Well, to be honest, because we have learned so much.  On an regular basis, we looked at our site and commented we could do better.  So we did.  The new site has Fuzzwich firsts, such as navigation.  And consistency.  And our favorite, expandibility.  Those “features” are only partially listed in jest, as our previous sites have lacked all three.  It has been suprisingly difficult to design a site stylistically unique, as Fuzzwich should be, yet capable of extension as Fuzzwich evolves.    We believe this site has great potential to really grow with Fuzzwich rather than become an obstacle to adding new products and features.

Oh and we told you Minivid would not be left behind.  You might have noticed the new and improved Minivid, which now runs on and benefits from the Fuzzwich animation platform.  It boasts a new set of completely awesome characters and music, a much larger animation area, and a more clean and polished interface. We will be migrating over all the old user accounts and content in the near future. Check out the sweet new widescreen and characters!

If all these changes weren’t enough, we have also had a personnel change.  Fuzzwich is incredibly happy to welcome Chris Patton to the team as our first non-founding member.  Chris has taken the leap from being one of our largest supporters from the “early days of Fuzzwich ” (in quotes because I don’t think we can quite yet claim a time of early days) to working right next to me on a daily basis.  Chris brings a influx of incredible ideas and will be focusing on developing the community and business.  Feel free to give him a welcome call at 770-356-8091.   He’ll appreciate it.  I promise.

Till next time,  animate.

We’ve been far too quiet for far too long, and we’re excited to break the silence and launch a brand new site and direction. Don’t worry, we’ve kept what you have already come to love about Fuzzwich, but added a few new boats. Lots and lots of boats.

In the months after Minivid’s launch, we were delighted to see the creativity and lengths to which people would go through to create unique animations. Requests for more advanced features to really push Minivid’s capabilities rolled in, and we tried to meet as many as possible while keeping Minivid simple. After our last large feature-set release for Minivid this past Halloween, we went into the tank to develop some really aggressive and often made feature requests, such as custom images and song uploads. After about a month into development of the next release, we arrived at an insurmountable quandary. There was no way we could cram all these features into Minivid while keeping the simplistic beauty, inviting nature, and overall playful manner of the application.

After stirring on the problem for a couple weeks, momentum started to build in a new direction. The more scenic route.

Introducing the Fuzzwich Animator (click to view screencast)

The Fuzzwich Animator is the start and the foundation of our new online animation studio. The Animator features the familiar Minivid “what you move is what you get” mechanic, and also focuses on a bunch of neat stuff that’s a huge pain in the ass to do anywhere else, like organic motion, camera tricks and physics. I won’t regurgitate the entire screencast, and instead suggest you explore the site and check out our exhibit to see what the new Fuzzwich can do.

And don’t worry about Minivid. It will reap the benefits of our new pursuit as we re-invent and re-imagine Fuzzwich.

We’re excited to see what you’ll make.

Fuzzwich is making some exciting changes and will be back Tuesday. We won’t blame you for constantly refreshing until then.

About 2 1/2 months ago, we received an email:

“My name is Tomas Fedaravicius and I’m the editor of the biggest IT magazine in the Baltics “New Communications” (”Naujoji Komunikacija”). We’d like to write a review about your website in our next month issue.”

We gladly accepted their interview and of course quickly forgot about it with all the other commotions at the time. Well, a few days ago a random package arrived in the mail with the note along the lines of :

“Dear Ryan, You will find the article about Fuzzwich on pg 38 next to the Manga girl”

We have no idea what the article says or even what language it is in. Hopefully they didn’t misquote us too much! To our knowledge, this is the first in print (as opposed to all the internet coverage) mentioning of Fuzzwich. I assure you it won’t be the last.

Fuzzwich put on a costume. Do you like it? Accompanying the Halloween attire, we pushed out a couple notable improvements last night. At least a few of the common annoyances are out of the way.
Improvements to text bubbles It’s now easier than ever to manipulate text bubbles while making a Minivid. We even color coded everything for you.

The Pick now only plays on page load once a day. I use Fuzzwich as a homepage. Everytime I opened a new browser, I would hear the Pick play. As much as I like the Picard song, there are only so many times a man should have to hear any piece of music.

Never lose a Minivid again due to not being logged in. Forget to log in? No account? No worries. Just go ahead and publish the Minivid under any name. Once you log in or create a new account, you’ll then be given the chance to “claim” any videos you just made.

We won’t forget you now. Fuzzwich was constantly forgetting who you were every time you came to the site. Just check the ‘Remember me’ box on your next login and we won’t make the same mistake again.
The list is far longer of more subtle changes, but we’ll just leave it at that for now. Happy Halloween.

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