Pink and Ain't

So I’ve noticed a couple things.  First, most people who use Flash are either animators or programmers, but rarely both.  There are lots of animators who dabble in programming and lots of programmers who dabble in animation, but in my experience you’re likely to have much more passion about one than the other, leading to having much more skill and experience in that one as well.

The reason I mention this is that occasionally I think about how few people there are who produce decent JSFL commands.  I think it’s because the people who are really interested in Flash commands are the animators – particularly the professionals, who work in Flash every day.  It’s certainly true for me: I animate in Flash for 45 to 50 hours a week, and I frequently think of things that I wish Flash could do.  Earlier in my career, before I Knew the Way of the JSFL, I would just grumble to myself and go on working around that lack-of-feature or bug.  Unfortunately I think that’s what most Flash animators do, many of them not even being aware of the purpose of the Commands menu.

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Someone asked me recently if I could describe what exactly Flash animation is, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to do that here.

Flash is a program used mostly for creating interactive web sites and animation on the internet.  It’s different from most other graphics programs in that it’s based on vectors, not pixels.  What that means is that when the graphics data is stored in memory or on disk, it’s saved as a description of lines, curves, and boundaries of filled areas.  In most programs (such as, for instance, Photoshop and Windows Paint) graphics information is stored as an array of dots called a raster.

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Allow me to introduce you to one of the films I made while I was a student at UCLA: Fried Ham.

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There’s a lot of animation out there on the internet and, honestly, most of it is terrible.  Everyone’s gotta start somewhere, though, so I don’t begrudge people their learning process.  I just hope that it is, in fact, a learning process.  If you really enjoy making animation then you should make an effort to get better at it.  Animation (and art in general) is one of the most demanding fields in terms of how much you have to learn and practice in order to break into it professionally.  Most people will spend many years practicing their drawing and learning the principles of animation before they’ll be able to do it well enough for someone to pay them.

So, in my fantasy that you, the reader, are an aspiring animator, I’d like to give you something to consider: Secondary animation.

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I’m looking forward to Flash CS5.  Let me rephrase that.  I’m hopeful for what CS5 could be.  On the other hand, that’s been true of every release of Flash since MX 2004.  They promise these great new features, but rarely do they address the real nagging problems.

CS4 introduced quite a few bugs and annoyances, though the UI rewrite also fixed a bunch of issues that have bugged me ever since I started using Flash.  You should see the list of bugs and feature requests I’ve assembled.  I’ve submitted them all to Adobe’s bug report / feature request web form, but I have real doubts about how much they pay attention to that.

There was a feature that I used fairly often when I worked on Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends that disappeared in version 8: copying vector art from Flash to Illustrator.  I have no idea why they would have taken that out, since it was so useful to us on Foster’s.  The most common thing we would use it for would be to take some art that we had in Flash, bring it into illustrator, and either create an art brush out of it or apply an art brush to it.  This would make things like animating a complex striped tiger tail as easy as animating a standard Flash line.  Translation: very easy.  It was even used once (before I came onto the show) to animate an entire character – a particularly gangly and clumsy one.

Here’s my dream, though: make it so I don’t even need Illustrator.  Add art brushes to Flash.  Wouldn’t that rock?  It would potentially create very high vertex counts but it would be amazing in terms of versatility.  And, having my foundation firmly in TV animation, what do I care about vertex counts?  As long as the renderer can handle it without crashing I’m good.

And while you’re at it, add trapezoidal transformation of symbols, smarter shape tweens, and any number of other things that Illustrator does so much better but belong in an animation program like Flash.  Make my wish come true, Adobe: make Flash rock for animators!

Moved to a new Wordpress blog from my old Myspace one.  I’m repurposing this a little.  I’ll still talk about production on Don’t Fear the Sitter but I’ll also talk about my Flash tools.  I have a huge library of Flash commands, WindowSWF panels, and Actionscript 3 symbols that I plan to showcase here.  Most of them I wrote myself, but there are also some that I’ve gotten from other sources on the web.  I’ll try to give credit where it’s due. but please let me know if I miss something.