Looking at the Oscars and Ratatouille this year, Happy Feet last year, The Incredibles, etc etc etc…it reminds me of when I was a teenager and we had all these fricken ‘super groups’ like Toto, and Emerson Lake and Palmer, and Yes, and Super bullshit Tramp, and music was all high concept and high production and done by REAL musicians and it wasn’t meant for the likes of you with your cheap Gibson knock off and 3 chords, and then punk came along and sent all these fricken bloated dickheads to the back of the bus where they could jam and wank and never be heard of again.

So my point is, Ratatouille is Toto

-Eddie

While we wait around for the various post-production tasks to be completed, we thought it was time to dust off ‘Here’s Jimmy’ – an animated sitcom we started, then had to put on the back burner until we finished Los Campeones.

We recorded voices a while back, including the legendary Edd Byrnes (‘Kookie’ from 77 Sunset Strip, ‘Vince Fontaine’ from Grease, to name but two).  Edd prefers not to do Kookie any more, but he liked our script and agreed to reprise the character for our cartoon.

I ventured to Palm Springs with ‘Here’s Jimmy’ collaborator Jim Cherry to catch up with Edd, who was signing his biography – ‘Kookie No More’ – at an auto show.  We got to hang and chat with Edd, and of course got our books signed! -Eddie

Rather than spend valuable creative time noting our list of grievances with Flash, we decided to focus on the feature that gave us the most pain – filters!

Okay, the filters look great and they will immediately take your Flash backgrounds to another level.  But these filters come with a price; while they look good in Flash and when exported as stills, they are a bugger when it comes to rendering them as animation files from Flash.  So much so, that trying to successfully render and composite scenes that utilize Flash 8 filters has set our production back months as we try different workarounds. 

So having said that, yes – use ‘em, but be aware of the restrictions.

1. They will either disappear or ‘cut off’ (severely chop into the movie clip you have assigned them to) when enlarged to a certain point.  Solution; cut a large image up and make it 2 movie clips, rather than one big one.

2. If you are using filters on several different elements within a scene, some of them will disappear when exported to .swf.  This is a random, indiscriminate thing, regardless of size.

3. If you export you movie as a PNG sequence, the filters will still disappear if there is any up scaling (Zoom in) within the movie. 

click image to enlarge

4. Not specifically a filter problem, but a rendering one nonetheless: Sometimes an .fla won’t graphically handle an image very well, expecially if there is a lot of detail or a motion BG.  Be warned that whatever you see in your .fla will be what is exported in your PNG sequence

5. This is the big one.  If your layer containing the elements that have filters is set to OUTLINE, the filters will not render!

6. Panning with filter effects.  The best way is to make your image an animated graphic symbol, then within that animated symbol make your image a movie clip and add your filter.  Then motion-tween the animated graphic symbol

We haven’t used the new Adobe Flash CS suite, so we don’t know if this is a relevent issue with that software.  However, there are a lot of people who paid a lot of money for Flash 8 licenses that are stuck with this problem, so maybe some of this can be of help.

We … are … getting … closer… to… the… finishing… line…