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Using Paper Drawn Images in Flash

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Using Paper Drawn Images in Flash

Hi,

I am at the beginning stages of planning out a short animated cartoon. Up until this point I have done all my drawings on paper.

The short is part of a larger project. I will be pitching an animated children's series based on a two character picture book that I also wrote and illustrated.

My challenge is retaining the original look and feel of the picture book in flash. The book is done entirely in watercolor. I'm not fond of computer colored images and in not done well cannot really look down right awful.

Does anyone have experience in working with scanned images of art into flash? At the very least I'd like to import the art from backgrounds to retain the look and feel of the picture book.

JM

I don't know about anyone else but I'd love there to be a program like Flash that doesn't vectorize everything, preserving the original scanned artwork. Perhaps something like After Effects could be used, but in my experience it's not brilliantly suited to animation.

I guess if you knew what you were doing you could use a 3D program like Maya, applying all the artwork to flat objects as textures. I believe this is what they do on South Park these days.

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Andy's Animation

My process has been to animate and ink my drawings on paper, scan with an autofeed scanner, convert the frames to vector using Illustrator's Live Trace, and then import them into flash.

The end result will give your flash animation a very non-flash, professional look. The only drawback I've had is that flash starts to struggle with the playback after you cross the 2,000 frame mark and will begin crashing from the sheer amount of content in your movie. I was also using lot's of layers and doing all the sound directly in flash too.

A remedy I came up with was to do each scene one at a time and then composite them back together in after effects by exporting my flash file into png sequences.

It seems like a lot more work than it actually is, and to me getting the precision of hand drawn lines on paper makes it worth it. It looks so much better than just drawing directly into flash with a tablet.

http://ben-reynolds.com
Animation and Design

Using Paper Drawn Images in Flash

Thanks Ben.

I really get excited about doing my drawings first on paper then importing them. I am pretty good with a tablet, but the computers tendency to correct my lines seems to take away slightly from the unique look of my work.

Does anyone have anything else to add to that process? Are there others here who have had success with and use this method?

Thanks

Jack