Great Interview with John K and Flash Animators

http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/07/comcast-and-john-k-got-game.html

This interview has some really insightful comments by John K (eg. about sourcing and working with artists and animators from the internet): "My new working method is possible because of the internet. When you have an actual studio in a certain city, your talent pool is limited to who lives there and is available."

One benefit for people working in an animation studio is to learn from those with more experience.  It seems John is using the internet to extend this (eg. with his publicly available John K curriculum site).

"AARON: What type of art direction did you offer Kali before she started painting the BGs?
JOHN: I told her to read my blog posts on color and do exactly what they say to do, and don’t do what they say not to do."

There are lots of great comments about Flash animation techniques and style from Eric Pringle and Kristen McCormick, the two main Flash animators on the project (a commercial for Comcast).

Eric seems to think that putting eases on tweens in very important as he mentions it a couple of times, once when he is asked about the direction given from John K: "John’s main goal was to make this commercial not look ‘Flashy’ but still be smooth. He didn’t want too many overshoots, even timed tweens, or over distorted drawings using the transform tool. Most of the revisions he gave me were to substitute overshoots with slow ins to eliminate the jerky animation we often see in Flash cartoons." 

Another technical bit of info from Eric: "On the Comcast commercial I used some shape tween methods we use on Foster’s. After setting the shape tween, I keyframe it out and use the layer frame distributor plug-in and then export the FLA (Flash file) to an Illustrator file and apply the art brushes and import that stuff back into flash. I did that with the dinosaur’s neck and the dog’s nose animation. Also I used the tween2keys plug-in to eliminate some of the tweeny animation in some of the shots, but that’s not really a trick. For the vibrating fx on the burst and weird shapes I just made some shape tweens and then clicked the smooth tool a few times to slightly distort the shapes on each frame. Other than that stuff, I didn’t do anything other than slide John’s drawings into each other and hope for something nice."

Eric talks about animating mainly with pre-existing symbols in TV series work as opposed to working from layouts (which he did with John K): "On the TV series that I’ve worked on, everything is stock digital puppets with a few special poses here and there. On the Comcast commercial nothing is stock – John drew layouts for everything. I enjoy working with layouts a lot more, the poses tend to be stronger and more organic. Working with stock it’s always a matter of trying to Frankenstein a pose together, like getting the correct hand from the library to fit the pose, “eh, it’s the wrong angle, hopefully no one will notice.” However, for me, working with layouts makes the turnaround time much longer; maybe I’m just not accustomed to that kind of process anymore. From my experiences working with both layout and stock pipelines in Flash, working with stock is the best way of going about making a TV series. Layouts require too much clean up and rigging that would most likely bottleneck somewhere in the production. Though the quality is better with layouts, it is just not economical for the demands of the studios with tight budgets and tighter schedules, especially when competing with overseas shops."