46 Comments »   posted in Flash, Shorts

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Lizzi Akana created these Peter Max-ish inserts for the Ke$ha music video “Your Love Is My Drug.” Here’s a Quicktime link to the entire piece, directed by Honey, that shows how the animation fits into the primarily live-action video. I asked Lizzi if she could share details about the production and this is what she said:

I would say the bulk of the animation was completed (from design to final product) in around 2-1/2 weeks, give or take. In total, including added revisions at the tail end, I’d say the animation took a solid month. The animation was created exclusively in Flash and composited in After Effects.

The label and director wanted a psychedelic “Yellow Submarine”-inspired animation, so they thought I would be a good fit based on the work I had done on the MGMT video “Kids” that Christy Karacas directed. From the beginning, the idea was there to have animated elements integrated with the live action, which would then build up into fully animated scenes. The desert had to transition into an underwater scene, but in the end I was pretty much free to come up with whatever I wanted within that context for the first chorus. The second chorus was also wide open, so just tried to come up with images that I thought would be striking for that section. I obviously looked at a lot of Peter Max and Alan Aldridge, but I also found Moebius a huge source of inspiration.

This is my first time directing animation for a large commercial product. I was in charge of the concept/design, rough animation, and compositing for both choruses. The animation that was combined with the live action worked a little differently—with those scenes I was asked to create specific content and gave the clips to the video compositor as separate elements to integrate with the footage. In both cases, some additional animation effects/transitions were added after the fact during the final composite in LA.

There is no way in hell that I could have gotten this music video done without the help of some of my very good (and talented) friends. Henry Thurlow (who also worked on the MGMT video) and Gene Lee were my animators. We were all assistant animators on Superjail and contributed a ton of hard work to this project. Sarah Orenstein did the color design for my characters/backgrounds, and helped me come with with a lot of the texture effects in the video (the paper-y overlay, the glitter, etc.) Leah Shore came in to help as an animation assistant with certain shots, coloring scenes and animating small elements.

23 Comments »   posted in Flash, Music Videos, Leah Shore

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Bone—What Could Have Been

May 11, 2010 9:12 am

Just for fun, animator Andrew Kaiko created this hand-drawn Flash animation test of Jeff Smith’s comic Bone. He took the audio from an existing Bone video game. It’s too bad the forthcoming Bone feature won’t look nearly as appealing. The film is being made by Animal Logic, the studio that created Happy Feet, and based on the studio’s prior work, their interpretation will likely be all kinds of unwatchable. Jeff Smith himself recently told a crowd that he would have preferred the film to be hand-drawn except that nobody was willing to put up the money if it wasn’t CG. It’s a pathetic state of affairs when a cartoon creator, who understands his work best, is denied the technique of his choice because of unfounded beliefs about the financial performance of one particular animation technique over the other.

In the comment of his video, Kaiko writes, “Reflecting on this, even though the movie will be in CG, I REALLY think they should have a little 2D in it! Like, maybe in the opening and/or closing credits… or maybe in a short sequence in the body of the film!! It worked marvelously for Kung Fu Panda, and Cloudy.”

60 Comments »   posted in Comics, Flash

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Does Flash Have a Future?

May 10, 2010 2:42 pm

Animation created in HTML5

The controversy about Apple’s exclusion of Flash from the iPad may appear to have minor relevance to animators, but considering the number of artists and studios who animate with Flash, the issue will affect the animation community sooner than later. Primarily, it raises the question that if Flash becomes obsolete as a way of delivering video over the Web, is it also headed towards obsolescence as an animation production tool? The tool was never designed for broadcast animation production to begin with, and Adobe’s poor track record of supporting the needs of broadcast animators hasn’t endeared it to the community.

This article at Wired magazine is the single best piece I’ve read about what HTML5 is all about and how it will replace Flash on the web. The article includes this Spider-Man animation created entirely in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 (note: it is not viewable in all browsers). It is crude, but no cruder than what was being created with Flash’s predecessor, FutureSplash, in the mid-Nineties. Nevertheless, reading this making-of about the Spider-Man piece is an eye-opener. It amazes me how much effort is required to make cartoons that look less sophisticated than what was being made in the 1920s.

What Flash has working in its favor is loyalty from a core user base. Many animators still think that Flash is the best option. Nick Cross, who has made numerous shorts with the software, wrote an impassioned defense of Flash and explained why he doesn’t intend on abandoning it anytime soon. Adobe would be wise to listen to these animators and ensure that they don’t jump over to the next piece of technology that comes along.

40 Comments »   posted in Flash, Tech

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The Smile and Penny Show

April 20, 2010 5:00 am

Here’s the opening to The Smile and Penny Show, a web series created by Hobo Divine. His collaborator on the project is Mike Geiger. Super-limited animation of the Roger Ramjet variety isn’t easy to make look right, and few do it better than Hobo Divine so naturally I’m curious to see what he does with this idea. The characters have a website at SmileAndPenny.com.

7 Comments »   posted in Flash, Shorts

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Sonar by Renaud Hallée

April 1, 2010 12:58 am

An elegantly layered visual representation of sound by Montreal-based Renaud Hallée. Sonar was made in Flash with keyframe animation (no scripting was involved).

(Thanks, Gene Fowler)

9 Comments »   posted in Experimental, Flash

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The Ship That Never Came In by Kim Deitch

April 1, 2010 12:05 am

I don’t know how I missed this before, but I just found this 2003 animation (by John Kuromoto) of a Kim Deitch cartoon based on a Waldo strip Deitch originally wrote for a comic in 1992. It’s also appropriately being used as a promo for Deitch’s graphic novel The Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Click here to enjoy The Ship That Never Came In.

(Thanks, Mike Stanfill)

5 Comments »   posted in Comics, Flash

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