March 1, 2003

  • Software to use with FLASH

    People often ask us if we use anything else with Flash when animating. Generally, not really. All our animation is drawn with pencil and paper – scanned into the computer, then imported into Flash and ‘cleaned-up’ (traced and coloured) using a pressure-sensitive Wacom Intuous pen and tablet. We also add sound in Flash, composite, do camera moves etc.

    It’s not that we’re Flash purists. Finding and learning new software takes time…

    Thanks to the (now defunct) Were-Here forums, we discovered Expression 2 last year. This is a vector illustration program that lets you create all sorts of cool brushstroke effects which can be imported into Flash as vectors. Great for producing richly-textured backgrounds. We now use version 3, but it’s not much different from version 2.

    For airbrush-style (or chalky, painterly, bitmap-looking) backgrounds, Eddie also recommends Corel’s Painter Classic, which comes with the software for the Wacom tablet. Very user-friendly – much more so than something like Photoshop.

    Another cool program is Wildform’s Linx. (still learning this one) It’s called a “Flash editing program” which lets you import SWFs (and other file formats), chain them, crop and scale them etc. and output as SWFs or projectors. This is great if your project consists of several SWF files that need to be combined together or if you no longer have the original FLA files to work with. 

    Adobe Streamline - Great if you prefer to clean-up/trace/ink your animation on paper rather than in Flash. Streamline is a program that batch-vectorizes your drawings, so that they can be imported into and edited in Flash.

    The only time we used Streamline was back in 1999 when Locomotion.com commissioned Afro Baby as a Flash movie. We had already animated this show traditionally (ie, hundreds and hundreds of sheets of animation drawings) and we didn’t fancy re-animating the whole show in Flash, so we took the drawings we had already done (removing half the inbetweens for 12fps), streamlined them, and used Flash as an ink-and-paint/compositing tool. Take note, though that the “cleaner” your original artwork, Streamline will do a better job.

    This year, ¡Mucha Lucha! Season 2 will be produced at WB, using the Streamline method. All the animation will be inked by hand and streamlined for Flash. 

    For sound, we use Cool Edit 2000 to edit sound files and convert .wavs to mp3s if needed. Cool Edit also has some great delay and pitch effects which you can apply to your sound file before you import it into Flash.

    Some other programs we’d like to know more about (if only there was more time!):

    After Effects - for post-production, adding special effects etc. Used by WB to create special effects on ¡Mucha Lucha! Season 1.

    Toonboom Studio- designed more for the more traditional animator who wants to produce Flash-compatible animation. As far as we know, Toonboom doesn’t do anything that Flash can’t do, except for some extra camera moves.