1. What is your own opinion of Flash animation?

Chin & Mort: Even though Flash as a program was never designed for broadcast TV, its affordability and user-friendliness has encouraged and enabled traditional animators to produce and show their own films. Whether the end product is for the Web or television, full or limited, we think you have to judge it on its own merits as you would with any other show, regardless of the software used to produce it. Flash is a production tool. It’s how you use it that makes the difference.”

Crown: I’m not sure what Flash animation is. Flash is a tool we use to create animation, not to define it. A production using Maya isn’t creating Maya animation any more than we are creating Flash animation. Flash is our keystone program where we do most of our building and animating, but we also use many other programs and techniques to make a show the best we can. There are inherent limitations in Flash as a program, but if you understand what they are and design a show that uses them as strengths, you can produce animation well within the quality standards of any client.

Hardman: ¡Mucha Lucha! was presented to us in the all-Flash format — which was great because it allowed us to really see the visually dynamic fantasy-action and provided us with a real sense of the show in such an early stage of development. It has been wonderful and a great way to be able to really get what we want visually out of the series.

Lyons: It’s not good for everything. It gives a bright, clean look, very flat. It’s good for things that are graphic, simply designed and don’t need sophisticated expression. It’s not a cure-all.

Meza & Markowitz: We believe that Flash is an excellent tool for many styles of animation. Also, we think that Flash has grown because its diversity. One file can be used for broadcast television, the Web, and print, all with a single Flash file.

Nodelman: Flash is a great tool for animation and has practical uses all the way through television broadcast. Where people run into problems with it is when they forget that it should be used as part of the animation PROCESS and not the end all and be all, “push the button and it animates itself.”

Flash pioneer and Animation Collective ceo Larry Schwarz just finished Princess Natasha (pictured on right) and Kung Fu Academy for AOL.

Schwarz: Flash changed my life! It has blown open the gates of entry to the animation business.

Watts: It’s a great tool to repatriate a type of animation back into North America. It’s also an extremely efficient tool, but for animation purposes I would like to see some changes to enhance the program.

Wyatt: It’s a terrific versatile program although I am dubious about categorizing Flash animation as a genre, especially as so many people are using it with other packages, and in so many different ways.

2. When did you first start using Flash? Did you do much experimentation with it before starting to use it in production, or did you experiment while first using it in production? What is the practicality of mixing Flash with other animation techniques in the same production?

Chin & Mort: We first became aware of Flash animation on the Spumco Website, back in 1996. We were working in traditional animation at the time and were impressed to see traditional cartoonists were using it, and producing animation for a new medium. We had an inkling back then, that this would be the way to go. Although we thought the future was in producing web cartoons; we never dreamed that Flash would be able to be utilized for television! (We never saw Flash as a “toy;” as far as we knew it, it was the most efficient way of streaming cartoons on the Internet. At the time we didn’t see ourselves as “Web animators” so the program didn’t mean much to us.)

When we first used Flash, it was out of necessity. In 1998, we were commissioned by a web entertainment portal to produce series in the Flash format. We were literally thrown into the deep end and were learning on the job. Although we’d started to get familiar with the program, we had never used it to produce anything of a substantial length, then suddenly we had several minutes of Flash animation to produce on a tight deadline and small budget. There wasn’t really any time to experiment and, five years ago, there weren’t any helpful user manuals around either.

We remember there was already a large Flash community on the Internet at this time (with the Internet animation boom). We would be scouring the Flash user forums for tips, and posting questions everyday. People helped each other out and shared technical advice. There were other traditional broadcast animators taking advantage of this “new” tool.

Crown: I was unimpressed with the Flash animations I first saw on the Internet, but I didn’t place the blame on the program. Flash is a simple program to use at a beginner level, allowing anyone who wants to be an animator the ability to produce films from their home computers, but that doesn’t mean they’re animators. When I began using Flash, it was with a background of 12 years working in the industry as an animator, so I had a good idea of what I wanted to create. The trick was learning how to use a program designed to build web pages to create broadcast quality animation, and then standardizing those techniques for large-scale productions. Flash has proven itself to be quite flexible and fun to use. I started to use Flash in 1999 when I was creating a character called Mr. Dink, which ultimately became a Bardel production. The series of shorts, The Mr. Dink Show, ended up being the first Flash series to be broadcast in Canada on CTV’s Comedy Network, as well as being available online. I didn’t experiment as much as I just kept doing things the wrong way over and over until I could figure out a better solution.

Most of the time I find it difficult not to use Flash with other animation techniques, to work at the level we are.