Meza & Markowitz: Its diversity. We can work on a couple of scenes, render them in quicktime form, and have the animation director look at them for approval. Any changes can be made in a matter of minutes. This of course depends on the changes. But if the change is something like resizing, reframing, cutting frames, adding frames, etc., we can change our scene in a matter of minutes.

Now, if you had those same scenes that went overseas, you would have to wait about a month before you saw the outcome. And even then, some translation might be lost. Additionally, let’s say after we finished the scenes above, the director told us to make our broadcast animation ‘web ready’ and to print frame 36 and 109 for an advertisement. We would simply change our frame rate, adjust our dimension and adjust our animation for the slower frame rate. For the advertisement, we would just go to the frame, render it as a jpeg (Photoshop ready) and drop into the art director’s folder for tweaking.

This can be done all in one day, which, to us, makes Flash a VERY powerful tool for animation.

For Siriol’s Robin Lyons, Flash offers a fresh look and cost effectiveness.

Nodelman: Speed and archiving efficiencies. One of the neat tricks of Flash is splitting up the workload between man and machine. If composed properly, a shot can have hand-animated stuff going on, combined with a whole lot of Flash tricks filling out the frame. This saves manpower, which saves money. Archiving is also key. The more reuse, the less cost, but the old Hanna-Barbara gag of running past a tree, then a rock, then a tree, then a rock gets old quick. With Flash, you can change the tree into a barber pole or a T-rex, or change the hues to turn day into night.

Schwarz: Flash is fast. We spend time building up files, but then we can keep re-using them. Once we start animating, it flows so quickly. It also gives us the ability to go in and make quick changes without a lot of work.

Watts: It is a major advantage to produce in Flash because the ratio of minutes that a crew can produce is incomparable to traditional techniques.

Wyatt: Flash animation CAN be very quick and CAN be very economical, but this is not its defining feature. Its main advantage is simplicity and versatility.

5. When did you see Flash animation start turning up in animation production for broadcast? Did you make any of the pioneering productions?

Chin & Mort: As far as we know, Flash has been used in professional animation production for a long time now. ¡Mucha Lucha! may be the FIRST Flash series on American broadcast TV, but overseas studios have been using Flash to produce TV commercials and series for a couple of years now. For instance, Quads (a Canadian series which was animated in Australia) was produced using Flash. Back in 1998, we were using Flash to produce broadcast interstitials for the Nickelodeon Channel (Twisted Telly).

When ¡Mucha Lucha! was in development three years ago, Warner Bros. Animation commissioned a pitch (two-minutes) from us, and they requested this in the Flash format. They were impressed with the results and embraced Flash as a means of producing the series.

Crown: If by ‘professional’ you mean television broadcast then I first saw it turn up here with The Mr. Dink Show. Since then all the shows we’ve worked on have been part of the pioneering of professional Flash productions, at least for us.

Lyons: I think a lot of people, like us, started using Flash for the Web. It is, after all, a web tool. When they realized that Web animation is not really viable commercially, they started using it for television. We unfortunately did not make any of the pioneering professional productions.

Nodelman: As soon as the first producer heard the words “cheaper to use.” Whether we made any of the first Flash productions depends on who you ask. We are very proud of Venture Brothers and Omega Dome. Venture just has a great classic look about it, and Omega is able to combine live-action and Flash animation so quickly that we can do an animated show that is actually topical.

Flash offers Noodlesoup the ability to attack topical subjects quickly on Omega Dome.

Schwarz: We’re proud that at Rumpus Toys, my old company, our animators were responsible for Herschel Hopper: New York Rabbit, the first online Flash movie [April 2000]. At 38 minutes, it was the longest piece of Flash content produced for the Web. That was until the following year when we released The Day I Saved America at 52 minutes. We even premiered The Day I Saved America in a movie theater that could project digitally. We just came and plugged our box in and projected it. Since it’s all vector based, it blew up great.

Both movies recently completed a yearlong broadcast cycle on the Showtime Family channel. We were really pushing the limits of the program back then, when people were doing few second shorts. We continue to innovate by combining Flash with traditional ink-and-paint techniques. With our joint venture partner, Mainframe Ent., we’re developing better ways to approximate the look of CGI.

Wyatt: We were using Flash in professional production in 1998, both for web and TV broadcast. We produced the U.K.’s first Flash series for the Web, Tommy Sausage in 1998.