more animated, narrated stories are on their way

a couple more animated, narrated stories are in the pipeline. coming soon.

The Great Ping Pong Ball Experiment (Flash)

The Great Ping Pong Ball Experiment - Illustrations, narration and Flash design by Kimberly Race of Oklahoma City.

Other children's stories.


Future Creative Collaborations

I'm looking for a handful of persons to collaboratively write new stories -- and nonfiction reading passages, using
SubEthaEdit. This software works well over the Internet. You need to have access to a recent Mac with Mac OS 10.3 on it, type comfortably fast and have a creative flair. A sense of humor/playfulness is a plus.

If you're interested, send me an email telling me which is your favorite Dr. Seuss story and why. If you have have pertinent creative writings already on the web, I'd be interested in reading them.

If you have a talent and interest for creating these kinds of Flash animations, I'd love to hear from you, too. A creative league of writers and animators is forming. Phil Shapiro, pshapiro@his.com

If you'd like to try your hand at making Flash web multimedia without the expense and learning curve of MacroMedia Flash, you might check out InAlbum and SwishPix, two Windows programs that are affordable and easy to use. Note - these programs do not have the animation capabilities of MacroMedia Flash, but they do create Flash files. I haven't tried either of these programs yet, so if you make something with them and place it on the web, thanks for letting me know.

Some wonderful tutorials for youth (and others) about Macromedia Flash have been created by KidzOnline (You'll need a Windows computer to view these.)

If you're looking for a fun and powerful no-cost vector drawing program, Inkscape has a lot to offer. You can currently run Inkscape on Linux and Windows computers. A Macintosh installer package is in the works.

It would be really sweet for some folks to create some narrated (or un-narrated) Inkscape demonstrations using Camtasia Studio 2 for Windows computers. These demostrations/tutorials can be saved in Flash format and placed on the web for others to learn from. One easy way of creating these tutorials is to have someone artistically talented create a drawing in Inkscape, and then go back and explain how they created the drawing.

I'll be linking to such creations from this blog and will talk up the creations on various local and national email lists. The Inkscape web site would likely link to such explanatory materials, too.