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?

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.