Go to any Web online forum and ask how much it would cost to create a piece of online, Flash animated content and you'll receive a barrage of different answers. You may get a high priced quote; probably from an expert Flash designer whose intent is to keep his pool of clients lucrative. You may receive a low quote; most likely from an inexperienced Flash artist who's willing to do anything to pay the rent. Should you trust either? With what current options do you have to compare?

What Has Animation Cost Before?
So far, traditionally animated productions have been fooling producers and studios into thinking that any animated project will cost an arm and a leg and have to undergo years of development. A studio that develops traditionally animated productions usually has a wide variety of artists on staff; each artist is a part of a separate team of character designers, layout designers, in-between animators, clean-up crews, painters and background artists to name just a few categories.

How much would it cost to house these artists under a single studio? How many artists do you have? How much is each paid? How much money do you spend on supplies, animation equipment and lost time? The bills add up and a budget can be most unforgiving.

How Does Flash Keep Costs So Low?
Flash animation offers its own way of cutting out the middlemen, saving you a ton of money and shortening production time to a fraction of its original length.

Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand, two of the leading vector graphics creation software for print and the Web. © Adobe Systems and © Macromedia.

Due to the program's built-in vector design tools, artwork can be drawn directly into the project file or imported from many popular design applications (i.e. Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand). The artwork is then placed as a symbol into an indexed library, waiting to be re-used again and again to minimize file size. In turn, the tasks of line testing, cleanup, tracing and painting are quickly condensed into the work of a single artist.

Hours of cumbersome lip-syncing and animated loops are easily conquered using a feature in Flash known as "movieclips." Movieclips treat dialogue-driven animation and redundant movement as collective pieces of artwork, which can be edited and assembled with any other symbol in the project's library.

Using an immense library of body parts, props, lighting effects and background artwork, a professional Flash artist can produce animation at breakneck speed. By either using the computer's own processor to "tween" the animation, or by assembling each frame on its own, a 10 second chunk of completed work could theoretically be done in a day. Keep in mind that this is the work of one Flash animator, not a team of expensive, traditional artists.

What Sort of Animation Is Flash Best Suited For?
Flash animation is generally geared toward an audience of Internet users, meaning that each animated episode should be limited to a length of 5 minutes or less as well as restricting the complexity of the animation itself. The popularity of Flash animation stems from its ability to give engaging animated storytelling at such small file sizes.

If longer, larger-scaled productions are what you hope to accomplish, Flash also has the ability to export its animation into a digital video format (i.e. QuickTime MOV, Windows AVI). This format can then be used with video editing software such as Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects, AVID and iMovie. Since Flash artwork is vector based, you can resize your animation without losing any quality whatsoever.

Flash can incorporate interactivity into your animation, giving developers the ability to design engaging Websites, online games and online presentations.