Wow, this really takes me back! You remember waaay back when, back in nineteen thirtylongtimeago? Back when all the Flash animations were black and white and ran at two fpS (frames per Sunday)? Gathering ‘round a two inch (1 inch viewable) postage stamp of a monitor connected to the very first Apple computer, that’s right the Apple Half-a-slice. It had cockroaches for a cpu and it’s main media was scotch tape, but it was just good enough to blink out the file we’d been downloading for the month before.

Back then, the internet was one bit that people would send by way of the Pony Express. Back then all the electrons were slow cube shaped things. And back then, Mr. Shmallow was top cat! Not only was he in all the candy shops, you’d see his pictograph on the side of the ice delivery truck, scrawled onto prit-near EVERY white picket fence and when you weren’t waiting to download his shenanigans onto your computer, you went to the pictureshow where you’d ignore the newsreel just waiting to see his latest antics! Those were simpler times, those were “gooder” times and all was right with confectionery!

This was one of the first if not THE first show-off piece I created with Keynote and there’s a little bit of story behind how it came to be. If you haven’t met Mr. Shmallow yet, then maybe you’re missing out on some of the funniest AND funnest animation on the web at Homestar Runner.com. I was working on a tutorial on how to create an animated QuickTime media skinned presentation (which got posted at KeynoteUser) using Adobe LiveMotion, Keynote, QuickTime Pro, Applescripts, some string, an ounce of iron ore and a boat. I could have just done what I normally do and make up 3 or 4 slides, but I was feeling inspired by the work of the Brothers Chaps... Mr. Shmallow was crying out for some bullet-pointed attention!! I chose the theme I did because it looked like an old book and because Gerry Straathof provided it free to the Keynote community (Old Book theme downloadable from here).

As I put things together, I didn’t want anyone to think that the idea of Shmallow was mine, so I made the skin boldy display that he’s from the Homestar Runner site. After I got everything put together and used Apple’s QuickTime script to build the movie, I noticed that I was one pixel off in my calculations. I’d thought about fixing it before posting it now, but now I feel it has a sort of unfinished character to it, so I left it AS-IS.

Since this was created using Keynote 1 (pre-automatic timed builds), it was and is understood that you click each slide to advance. If you download the movie and open it in the QuickTime Player, you can use the black border areas to drag it around the window to and fro. Actually, I only got time to test “to” but if you have any problems with “fro” let me know. I’ve received reports that you can also drag it “hither” and “tither” but I can’t test those as, well, I don’t drag that way. :) Feel free to have fun with it and I hope you enjoy my take on their animation!

Another fun fact, the tutorial at KeynoteUser was once linked to from one of Apple’s QuickTime News pages. That I didn’t know about at the time, but as you can expect, I thought it was really cool!