Before I get too far into this web development blog, I should probably talk a bit about how I got started.
17 years ago, I went to school for Fine Arts and in 1998, Animation. Neither courses had anything to do with writing JavaScripts. No, but if it weren’t for the increasingly digital nature of how animation is being produced today, I certainly wouldn’t have discovered my passion for scripting.
I have been working for a company called PIP Animation for almost eight years now. Although the company had always boasted being all-digital (meaning the exclusive use of computers and software to accomplish what used to be done on paper), they we not yet using programs like Flash. It wasn’t until about three years ago that I syncronisly discovered that the Flash supported a form of JavaScript for it’s User Interface that practically wrote itself (by way of the History Panel) and I met Chris Fourney (who was already writing extensions for Flash). Between my own little discoveries whilst using designing in Flash, and seeing what Chris was doing, I was bitten by the bug.
I would have jumped right on the Scripting bandwagon if it weren’t for a teaching position that I was offered, and that I graciously accepted, for the same Animation program I had graduated from five years earlier. It was to teach 3D using Maya 7.0. I loved it. I got totally engrossed in the world of 3D and forgot about Flash and Scripting. Ironically though, through Maya, I began to learn MEL Scripting. MEL is Maya’s own flavor of JavaScript designed for is API (Application Programming Interface). So, even though I was involved in teaching the basics of 3D to students for the next two years, I still had this growing interest for scripting that was about to break through the surface.
The 3D teaching gig ended last year and since then I have been working at designing 2D characters in Flash and in the last few months, I have temporarily moved into a compositing job where I decide how to output layers for scenes animated in Flash to be treated in After Effects. Even though my jobs didn’t demand it (or give me much time for it), I have always tried to find ways to script everything I do, and learn more and more about the scripting language as I go. Between when I first started designing last year to now compositing, I have written over 20 scripts of varying complexity for the Flash API. Most of them just help me do my day-to-day tasks through automation. Some have been to design extensions through the used of SWF Panels, where I get to use my design sense to create user interfaces that I think are attractive, intuitive and functional.
As I return to the root of it all, JavaScript, through my ongoing self-training, I will begin to throw up a few of these scripts here on this blog. Hopefully I will begin to get some visitors who wouldn’t mind sharing their ideas and opinions on them.
I look forward to it.

Here I go. From my humble beginnings scripting what I called “helper apps” for Flash 8 at the animation studio where I work during the day, I am now diving head first into JavaScript and, more specifically, AJAX. The ultimate goal would be to create my own Web Apps and deploy them on my site, www.douthwright.com.
I’ll chronicle my experience here in this blog for those of you who are interested in doing the same. Hopefully some experienced people out there might offer some advice even. I am always open to ideas.
Well, I’m off to go meet a friend for coffee who has been instrumental in leading me down this new and scary path. Who said you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Not that “Thirty-something” is old, but their quite a few who are younger and know a great deal more about this stuff than I. Oh well, this story isn’t about them is it?
G-nite folks.