This post is just a test for embedding YouTube videos in the soon-to-be-launched Big Jump Productions Blog.

It does give you a glimpse at what we’re doing with Flash. It’s a hybrid style of animation that combines carefully executed use of Flash’s common shape and motion tweens with hand-drawn (on Wacom Cintiq tablets), frame-by-frame animation.  The result is animation that is as close to traditional as you can get and still deliver your shows affordably and on-time.

Having setup the ability to blog from the iPhone, I thought it would be fun to try it out while taking a break from animating at the studio. Although it can be frustrating trying to text with thumbs as big as mine, it’s amazing that I now posses the ability to post from anywhere. If I only splurged and got the 3Gs, maybe I could be editing my demo reel too

It’s been snowing here in Ottawa for the past two days (off and on), so I thought I would post this work I did a while back on Carl Squared.

The shots called for snow fall, which anybody can do in Flash alone, but the folks in the animation department decided to give me a crack at having some fun with Maya’s particle system instead.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

The particles in the last shot are traveling along a curve that cork-screws across the screen.  I drew the cycling speed lines by hand/tablet in Flash (you see these at the height of the transition.

Although it’s too difficult to see, the snow in the final shot actually collides and disappears at the appropriate depth in the background.  I quickly built a 3D version of the 2D background to give the particle emitter above the camera field a surface point for its particles to disappear into.  Particle wrangling fun!

It’s been fun and quite the experience being a Full-time Dad these past six months.  I count myself as being very fortunate that I had the opportunity to do so.  But now the work bug is biting again and it’s time to return to the “real” world.

I’ve been adding new content to the Gallery and Animation pages.  As always, the hard part is deciding what to post when you love doing everything from 2D and 3D design to animation to visual effects.

Get the Flash Player to see this content.

Feeling a bit nostaglic, I just had to post this demo from a few years back when I first started animating with Flash.

A small sampling of animation I have done in Flash over the past few years. Click on “Animation” in the Menu Bar above or in the side-bar to the right of this page.

It has been almost a year now since I started designing characters and costume changes in Flash. There was a four month period in the Fall where there was no work and I went back to compositing cartoons with After Effects CS3 (a very cool new version of an already awesome program). Two weeks ago, I started designing characters in Flash again.

A few weeks before I started, I had a dream about how I could revolutionize the way I do what we call “character builds”. It’s similar in 3D to Rigging a character model. The problem I see with how I am asked to design characters in 2D is that next to no consideration is made for re-use. Now I am not talking about re-using the entire character in a later episode. No I mean re-using there various body parts. And let’s not stop at the obvious things like eyes, mouths and hands. I mean go all out and include everything right down to the toes.

Often I am asked to take an existing character and put them in a costume that has them going from wearing pants to shorts, from a long-sleeved shirt to a T-shirt, from wearing shoes to sandals or bare feet. Now they way that I have been doing it up until now (and my colleagues have been doing it as well), is drawing only what the concept drawing shows.

In my dream I had designed each character body type in the nude (minus the details not relavent for a kids’ cartoon), then designed a layer of summer clothing (tank-top/T-shirt, swimming trunks/underwear, bare feet). The next layer would be their heavier clothing (long-sleeved shirt or jacket, pants, shoes/boots). Even if the initial concept for a character only had them in summer attire, I would still design their heavier set of clothes, always anticipating that need for them in the future.

I dubbed this dream design the”dressing dummy”. At the very least, each main character would have their own unique design. Now when it comes to the secondary characters, well, that’s where it gets very interesting.

Instead of designing the myriad of secondary characters, a task that can overwhelm most design teams that have head to work on productions 12 or more episodes in less than 6 to 8 months, approach the whole things from the perspective of a toy maker designing parts for a Mr. Potatoe Head doll. Working with the registration points within Flash’s symbols and orientating parts such as limbs so that transformations along the x and y axis happen along and perpendicular to the bounding box of the symbol, you can place most designs within so that they are easily interchangeable.

Since vector graphics are fairly cheap (in regards to file size), all parts and variations can be embedded in a single character file. Essentially creating a digital “extra” (if I may use a Hollywood movie-making term). Using free or cheap extensions like AnimSlider from Animonger.com, the Thumbnail Plugin from Trickorscript.com, or writing your own, you can easily flip through the various designed parts embedded within a symbol for each body part.

I am not suggesting using any new great and powerful technology, just changing the approach to character design for large productions. For me, I wouldn’t even have a design job if it weren’t for Flash. It has brought jobs back to North America from over-seas studios, if only for the short-term, so that designers and animators can ply their trades once again. Why not be diligent and constantly seek out ways to streamline the process so that we keep the work here at home?