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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001
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Flinch: The House That Flash Built Where There is a Will, There is a Way Brian Chin, background and layout artist for Flinch, concurs: "If you can write, draw the pictures, do the sound and put it together yourself, you could do it. That's not to say anybody's going to pay you for it, but at least you can get that far, which is light-years beyond what any of us would have been able to do a mere five or ten years ago." Brian comes from an almost two-decade history in television animation, most recently at Warner's. The freedom and independence of working in a Flash-based studio is a welcome change as Brian comments: "You can create your own film, right here, you don't need to have a staff overseas." Brian's first animation job was working on Filmation's He-Man: Masters of the Universe. He remarks on the irony of coming full circle in his career: "The funny thing is that we used to say how bad it was -- the stock system. It was the cheapest, and it's very similar with what we try to do with Flash now." But Brian notes that working on low-budget projects has helped him to economize his work, and achieve things in a more efficient manner. "We try to get the most mileage out of something that could be very minimal."
Amato echoes this sentiment: "It's a case where sometimes the limitations are hidden strengths. A lot of times you put a so-called limit on a creative person, and it fosters the most inventive solutions." With respect to using Flash, Amato remarks, "There's a standard Flash look, which is flat colors placed into single-width lines. But there's this plastic aspect of it, there's the beauty of abstract shapes, of 2D shapes that can be pushed and pulled sculpturally. Flash is this reservoir of effects that has not been challenged much." Amato is quick to point out that the artists at Flinch are doing some jaw-dropping stuff -- even people without a deep background in fine arts, "whose talents have just blossomed because of this one tool called Flash." For instance, Brian didn't have much experience with Flash, when he first came to Flinch. He practiced intensively for a month, before he officially came on board. "Of course what they do here is not really the type of thing that you would ever find by going through a book," he says. Lead animator Rob Lilly, who hails from Michigan and studied at the Union's Local 839 American Animation Institute, freely admits to the merits of Flash -- how, for example, it speeds up the process of production. But when he was first introduced to the technology, he thought, "No way, I'm not going to touch a computer. I want to stick with traditional animation, the old-fashioned way, pencil and paper." After a time, he relented: "Alright, let's look at this damn thing and see what it can do." Rob still begins most of his work on paper, for inspiration, but about 80% of Flinch's work is drawn directly in the computer. Lilly explains: "Flash is just a new tool for animation, that's all it is. You're going to see more and more traditional animators come to this artform, because there are not that many jobs out there in traditional." Having come from Sony himself, Rob enjoys working at Flinch because it is always pushing him, creatively. He agrees that one of the attractions of working at a smaller production house is that he gets to have his hands in a little bit of everything: character designs, storyboarding, keyframing.
Setting Up for the Long Run If Grillo is, as Lilly describes him, "energetic, happy and slappy," then Takami is, in a word, passionate. He sees, with the clearest vision and imagination, the future of Flinch — and for him it's just a matter of stepwise and patiently translating that vision to the television or computer screen. What distinguishes Flinch among online animation studios, and what has helped it to survive the recent Internet shake-out, is that, as Takami explains, "Flinch is not a portal. We didn't create our studio as a portal." Flinch does not focus its energy and resources in creating an exclusive channel for people to find and go to. Rather, Flinch provides its services directly to entertainment, Fortune 1000, and educational content companies. Flinch's goal is to make the Web a more entertaining, engaging and unique place to be. "Websites are generally used to house or to exhibit entertaining content, whereas our belief is that the Websites themselves are part of the content."
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