Cartoon production with Flash MX - Post Positions

Post, July, 2002 by Theron Marino

The sounds emanating from our studio have changed significantly since our acquisition of Macromedia's Flash MX. As we develop the creative and business aspects of an animated TV series package, there are no anxiety moans and no strange four-letter words.

Flash MX helps us achieve greater efficiency, lower animation costs and better market exposure. By designing, animating, and editing entire cartoons within Flash MX, we achieve greater levels of production efficiency, better market exposure and we keep all of our assets digital.

EFFICIENCY

While drawing the character and background outlines into Flash via a graphics tablet, we can tweak line type, thickness, space, jiggle, rotate and curve using the new Stroke Style tools found through the Property Inspector.

The Property Inspector, a feature borrowed from Macromedia's Dreamweaver product, receives its own "Hallelujah!" from our animators. This context-sensitive element shows the appropriate formatting options dependent on what is selected, thus freeing the need to display additional panels all over the screen.

Another way to maximize screen real estate is by taking advantage of the attribute panels. These mini-windows can be floating, docked, collapsed, or expanded. When you are finished customizing your workspace, you can save the panel set by name.

After proportioning outlined characters, we digitally ink the colors within Flash MX using the new Color Mixer panel. We can either use the eyedropper to select a color from the color bar, or we can type in the RGB or HSV values for the stroke and fill.

All of the geometry is easily changeable through the expanded transforming options, accessible through the Modify menu or by a simple right-click over the item. Envelope, a new transform tool, allows us to deform shapes by manipulating outlying Bezier control points on the envelope surrounding the object.

LOWER ANIMATION COSTS

There are many cost-saving benefits to producing an entire cartoon in Flash MX. Drawing the images directly into the computer not only brings us closer to that utopia "paperless office" concept, but it also reduces the need for acetates, ink supplies or a huge multi-plane camera system.

Grouping and saving related graphics into separate library files allows us to reuse all of the assets indefinitely, dramatically reducing production times and the need for a large production staff. We create libraries for everything -- from backgrounds and props to characters, ActionScript and animation clips. When we are ready to animate, we open the necessary .fla files as Shared Libraries, then it is easy to drag and drop into our main movie. Assets can be easily reused from episode to episode.

Using Flash MX also helps our studio with intangible costs such as production time saved, shorter download times and less focus on outside training. The Movie Explorer, a new feature similar to Dream-weaver's Asset Panel, shows all assets used in the current movie -- from symbols and multimedia to text, scenes, frames and ActionScript.

A beefed-up ActionScript user interface adds code hinting, colored syntax highlighting and customization. In addition to the decent ActionScript debugger, the comprehensive ActionScript Reference section shows information such as descriptions, usage context, parameters and examples.

While exact values for quick download times are too subjective to gauge, we agree that the shorter our audience's wait for viewing content, the better. Our tests using the Bandwidth Profiler conclude that sound and JPEG images account for the majority of a file's size.

We can manage this dilemma by using Flash MX's ActionScript commands loadMovie (for JPEG) and loadSound (for MP3) to dynamically load images and sounds directly into the Flash 6 Player, which greatly reduces the file size. This extends the loadMovie and unLoadMovie command functionality by which other Flash movies (.swf) can be inserted and ejected within the main movie during runtime.

The editing process has become easier with the addition of timeline folders to organize layers, frame resizing and pointer feedback Sound and effect settings can be changed directly from the Property Inspector.

LIMITATIONS

Although Flash MX includes many desired enhancements such as improved video import and compression (.mpeg, .dv, .mov, .avi) as well as pixel-level control at high magnification (400%)), the product is not a panacea for vector design and animation.

Our designers usually require the more robust toolset of Adobe Illustrator 10 for creating concept drawings. Luckily Illustrator 10 has three useful export features for Flash, including Illustator (.ai) file to Flash (.swf) file, .ai layers to .swf frames and .ai layers to .swf files.

Illustrator also supports file export to the Extensible Markup Language (XML)-enabled Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format, unlike Flash. Flash MX has an extended selection of file export options, including the Adobe Illustrator (.ai) sequence, which can be later imported into Adobe's product for subsequent SVG export.