Saturday, 05 July 2008

• Useful tips

  ONE OF THE MOST DIFFICULT challenges for me as an artist was to learn how to simplify my drawing style. Early in my career my work consisted of large scale lithographs depicting weeks of painstakingly complicated imagery. Spending days and often weeks on each print wasn’t uncommon for me. But if you asked me to whip up a simple cartoon character, I wouldn’t even know where to start. Fact is, simplifying my drawing style didn’t come easily. I was literally thrown into the world of cartoon animation when asked to join an animation team at a local production company. They already had an established series on a popular cable network channel (Dr. Katz, Comedy Central), and my job was to design and animate a pilot for Dreamworks. It was a nice way to get thrown into the world of animation, resulting in a very diverse artistic direction for me. I embraced the challenge. The next several years provided me the experience of designing and animating several successful television series and animated content for the internet. We use Flash Designing for everything, including storyboards, animatics, character and background design and, of course, animation. We were a paperless studio and Flash was our Swiss army knife of software tools. As Flash matured with each version, my skill level using it was maturing also. Strict deadlines and cut-throat delivery dates meant working fast. Working fast meant keeping the drawing style simple, which I became very good at through practice. Not unlike a classical musician ending up performing children’s pop music, it was my fine art training that helped pave the road to cartoon animation.

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• Motion tips

  LET’S FACE IT, Flash is about motion. In some cases, the more motion, the better. Motion can emphasize the intensity of an action sequence and can add a measure of realism to your animations. Whether it is making text fly
  around a website or animating a character in an action sequence, providing convincing motion effects can be critical to their success visually. In this chapter we will look at a few of what I consider to be the most valuable motion effects that you can use in your everday life as a Flash designer and animator.

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• Masking

  MASKS ARE POWERFUL TOOL FOR WEB DEVELOPMENT. They can be used in myriad ways to achieve limitless results. Masks can make your daily workflow easier, less time-consuming and, in most cases, become your most indispensable tool. Having the ability to control the way two or more layers interact with each other through the use of masks is vital to your abilities as a designer and animator. The coolest thing about using masks in Flash is that not only do they help you to create stunning images, they can also be animated - a very powerful concept that can be mastered quite easily.

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• Transformation

  SQUASH, STRETCH, BULGE, warp, distort, rotate, skew, deform - what do all these transformations have in
  common? Hint: it’s not how you felt after that second baked bean burrito you know you didn’t need to eat. Answer: it’s the Free Transform tool, the single most efficient and versatile tool Flash offers, and it will prove to be one of the most used tools in your daily animation workflow. The Free Transform tool is truly the Swiss army knife of tools as it allows you to perform a multitude of transformation tasks to raw vector objects, instances of symbols, imported images and broken apart text. This chapter will focus on the versatility of the Free Transform tool and how to apply it to your images.

  

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• Welcome to the Blog about Flash Web Development.

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