So much for more frequent updates huh? Well right after my last post I took some time off to see the sky and get a tan, but now I’m back to work. I can prove it too. Here’s my new live cam so you can keep an eye on me. New image every 90 sec, manual refresh :D

ToonBoom Animate released

If (like me) you’re a Flash animator and (like me) you heard a lot about ToonBoom animation software. You tried it out and (like me) found it a bit confusing but that’s probably because you (like me) were thinking in Flash terms. Since the “Kenny” job, I’ve fallen completely in love with ToonBoom Digital Pro which, despite being just the most amazing software a 2D animator could own, is priced quite beyond what the average struggling animator can afford.

ToonBoom Animate was released last Monday and in my opinion, nicely addresses any previous issues that Flash animators have had with ToonBoom software. I like to call it the ‘little brother’ of Digital Pro, but there’s not really anything little about it. A few awesome features off the top of my head are:

• Unrivalled colour management - Give names to your colours and organise them into palettes for characters, background elements, etc. If you change a colour, that change auto-updates wherever you’ve used it. For example, mix a steely grey for your hero’s eyes. Later if you decide on icy blue, just change the colour itself and it’ll automatically recolour his eyes throughout the entire project.
• Seamless export to video formats - Anyone who’s ever tried to export a substantial Flash project to a video format knows just how painfully time-consuming this can be. Not so with Animate. Even changing your movie’s dimensions (increase OR decrease) halfway through is completely painless.
• Traditional tone/highlight workflow - From offset rims for quick easy lighting effects, or hand-drawn tones for that professional touch.
• Blurred & variable opacity masks - Just wow. Also invertible, masks in Animate can be blurred and can have variable opacity, simply by using paint that has transparency (even solid-to-transparent gradients)! Awesome feature especially if you’re an FX animator :)
• Layer independent onion skin - each layer has its own onionskin button.
• Library and Symbols - There’s only one type of symbol in Animate that does everything you need. Live preview, easy control of the first frame start, looping & cycles, apply effects (blur, tint, etc).
• Fluid brush resizing - hold down the ‘o’ key, drag your mouse left-to-right to resize your brush. Very fast. A whole bunch of really useful brush shapes too. Here’s me, resizing my 30° ellipse brush.

• Inverse Kinematics - for those animators who use cut-out style puppetry animation, this isn’t exclusive to Animate.. it has long been a feature of ToonBoom’s animation software.

That’s just a few things, otherwise needless to say that Animate is definitely an exciting release for animators who are frustrated with the animation limitations of Flash. It’s also the most intuitive of their fantastic animation programs to date and it’s priced very competitively. Packed with animator-friendly tools, is based entirely on traditional animation workflow (with all the benefits of digital animation) and has a library of effects that will put your work way ahead of the average web animator.

There’s a free version (personal learning edition) so download it now and you’ll see what I mean. Call me (below) if you need help getting started in ToonBoom Animate.Wow, that really sounded like an advertisement but it’s just an enthusiastic review :D

Flash CS4 released

If you’re sticking with Flash and you decide to upgrade to Flash CS4, I think you’ll be blown away by it. There are a few persistent gripes, such as masking, audio, video format export, brush sizes & shapes, colour management and the Timeline. However, certain new features have thrilled the shit outta me! They include armatures (Inverse Kinematics), 3D movieclip translate/scale/rotate, the Motion Editor (an amazing, kickarse version of the old Custom Ease window), Spray Brush (which can spray movieclips all over the Stage - perfect for say, millions of flowers in a meadow, animated swaying in the breeze) and completely new motion tween model.

Don’t be daunted by all the new features and workflows though.. Adobe have kindly left the old methods in there so you can gradually ease into the new stuff at your own pace. You can still use the old tween model and custom ease graph. Again, call me (below) if you need help getting started.

BCA Live Animation help

While I’m in the mood for doing live stuff, I’ve set up a live help service on Skype that you can call if you ever get stuck in Flash, animation, ToonBoom, FX or whatever else you think I might be able to help with. Introductory price of $1 per min (USD) but if you have ever made a Brackenwood donation, you can call me for a free 20 mins. Just use the button below and tell me the email address from which you sent your donation. As I personally corresponded with 99% of Brackenwood donors, I will probably remember your name anyway.

This is a Skype service, so obviously you’ll need Skype installed on your computer, but in order to be charged for the call, you’ll need Skype credit. Read more about Skype credit here.

BiteyCastle Academy Live - Call now

Call me with any Flash or animation questions you have. I don’t start the meter until we agree that I can help you.

Wrath of the Lich King released

I had pre-ordered the game, so I went to the midnight launch and picked up my copy of the second WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. Upgraded my account and played a couple of hours, finally getting to bed around 3am. That’s my latest night in a loO0ong time.. probably won’t be able to play much until this current workload is out of the way but if you can get to the Oceanic server Khaz’goroth, drop me an ingame mail. I’m a lv 70 (soon to be 71) blood elf named ßitey (that’s spelled Alt+0223 itey)

gnight again!

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Lots of news, this update. Now that a whole bunch of freelance work is out of the way, I would like to post more frequent updates and ideally, return to the days where this was a fairly regularly updated tutorial blog. This post is all about what I’ve just finished and what I plan to do in the coming weeks.

NG Tank

My Newgrounds Tank award arrived and it’s bloody awesome - not to mention heavy, being solid bronze on a marble base! This is without a doubt the best trophy I have ever received for anything. The quality is unsurpassed and I want to thank Tom Fulp for his attention to making this something I am intensely proud to own and display. This is the first annual Newgrounds Tank and it was awarded to “Waterlollies” as 2007’s Movie of the Year on Newgrounds. Thanks to everyone involved :)

BCA

On the subject of tutorials,  BiteyCastle Academy has a new Flash CS3 chapter which I decided to offer as another free download. As I said on the BCA page, everyone had waited far too long for that chapter so I didn’t feel like I should charge money for it. As huge as the chapter is and as much work as writing it was, it’s all about the Flash CS3 tools so it’s not really something that you’d want to pay for. All my animation secrets and FX techniques in later chapters however, I’m sure you can appreciate that they’ll cost a little something ;)

I’m finishing up Chapter 3 right now which is all about creating graphics in Flash. We’re looking at creating backgrounds, mixing colours and storyboarding which will all help us prepare for the animation and effects chapters.

I’ll announce updates to the BCA page here on the WoodenBlog.

Dungeons and Dragons

My work on the fourth D&D 4th Edition short “The Red Dragon’s Interview” was finished a few weeks ago and it has been well received by various RPG communities. Remarkably, 99% of their comments are about the characters and the writing, rather than the animation itself. I guess I can see this as a small victory, partly because while admittedly I’m a bit of a feedback addict, I’m a believer that the animation and the medium must never outshine the characters and story. An audience must never be distracted by the puppet’s strings.

Going OTT on animation & FX can be as distracting as bad animation, particularly if the characterisation is weak. The D&D characterisation is strong and the writing is good so the animation itself faded into the background. Well.. that’s what I tell myself as I cry myself to sleep each night :P

Kenny’s World

My ToonBoom work with Bernard Derriman on an Australian TV series wrapped up a couple of weeks ago. The production company flew Bernard and I down to Melbourne for the wrap party where we met the cast & crew, drank and played pool well into the small hours.

I’ve been on this health kick for the past 6 months, eating well and seeing a personal trainer. The party was the first time I’d touched a drop of alcohol in all that time, so the next day it hit me pretty hard. It’s a 90 minute jump back to Sydney but it seemed like a hell of a long time to me, hoping I could hold my guts in until I got home.

Anyway, Bernard and I are both back onto our personal projects and Kenny’s World has begun airing on Channel 10 - to mixed reviews, I might add. First episode was pretty good but personally I found the second episode quite boring, as did a lot of my friends and family.

The animation accounts for anywhere between 10-60 seconds of an entire episode and whatever people might think of the show as a whole, the animation, FX and backgrounds are something Bernard and I are quite proud of. It really was a fun project and thanks to that job, I learned ToonBoom from the ground up and discovered what a fantastic program it is.

As a reminder, my ‘Prison Construction’ video series (1-6) on YouTube is from the work I did on one particular Kenny episode.

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Seeing that our project is beginning to take some big steps, I reckon I’ll start writing sporadic updates on the progress of writing the Brackenwood feature film. Without giving too much away this is probably a decent starting point for a full-fledged production blog from which it’ll be fun to retrace the film’s progress in years to come.

OK, for several months now, Ryan and I have been having regular story meetings over Skype. We’re using free scriptwriting software called Celtx (which I’ve featured here in the past) to organise the project. The file - which we send back and forth as we add our ideas - is packed with reference images, concept sketches, character, animal and world descriptions and many pages of randomly typed ideas. It also contains test scenes in script form, basic structural notes and broad act strokes.

Co-writer

I’ve known Ryan O’Loughlin now for about 15 years. We worked together at Disney and he was always an insanely talented artist and animator. He progressed through the ranks of animation and eventually came to be a character lead on several well-known Disney movies. Almost inevitably he became an Animation Director (notably on the Lion King and Peter Pan sequels). He’s been living in L.A now for a number of years, working as a story artist for Disney and now Dreamworks.

Typical Brackenwood Story meeting

Ryan is in Los Angeles and I’m in Sydney, Australia. At the start of each call we recap our last meeting and swap whatever notes, solutions and ideas we have come up with during the week. Generally, we both type our fast-flowing ideas throughout the conversation which can be anywhere up to 3 or 4 hours. It’s always an intensely focused, creative process where we identify structural problems and work out ways to overcome them. Invariably (so far), once a given problem goes back and forth a bit, we’ll figure out a workable solution and occasionally, something even clicks into place.

I decided to start documenting this journey because today, for the first time ever, I actually saw a proper structure beginning to emerge. Brackenwood is starting to smell like a film and I’m really really happy with how it’s growing. I’ve always been the first to admit I’m not too hot with storytelling structure so I feel privileged to have Ryan working with me on this.

 Further updates

Like I said, these updates will probably be sporadic to start with.  I’ve just filled you in on our process of working out structure and writing the outline, so there won’t be much to say for a few weeks, or at least until we start actually blocking in the acts. I’d like to get Ryan to contribute a few words here at some point too.. as I mentioned before, he’s a wicked artist so I’d like to post one or two of his Brackenwood concept paintings, sooner or later :)

– — -

Unrelated update: For those people waiting for Chapter 2 of “The Animator’s Flash”, sit tight. I’ve just finished the 4th D&D so I’ll have some time to upload the new chapter in a few days.

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My work on the Rice Krispies “Box of Fun” project has won the Silver Telly Award. Wee! Press release:

Rice Krispies’ “Box of Fun,” a Sing-a-long Video Animated and Produced by Adam Phillips, Wins 2008 Silver Telly Award

18th June, 2008 - Top former Disney talent Adams Phillips, working with Kalamazoo, Mich.-based interactive agency Biggs|Gilmore, has won the 2008 Silver Telly Award for Animation, the highest honor bestowed at the Tellys.

The “Box of Fun” sing-a-long, which is available online at www.RiceKrispies.com, was created to encourage moms and kids to sing and make music together to the catchy lyrics of children’s favorite, Ralph’s World.

“Working with Adam was outstanding. A truly talented individual who does great work on his own AND when you hire him. He has no double-standards and that shows. We worked across time zones and against deadlines and it all came together without a glitch. Congrats, Mate.,” said Biggs|Gilmore’s Wolfgang Hofmann (Associate Creative Director).

Thanks Wolfgang! :D

-Phillips

(ps. it looks like this)

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BCA is finally launched with a free chapter from an upcoming eBook, which I’ll soon be selling from the new BiteyCastle Academy page. Whether or not you have animation experience, this introductory chapter will introduce you to the Flash CS3 environment and start you off with a simple frame-by-frame animation exercise.

Huh? Where did this come from?

I left Disney Australia in 2004 but when the studio was closing down in mid-2006, I was called back to run a series of Flash animation workshop for all the animators who were about to find themselves on the front steps. Over the space of a couple months, I ran about 6 separate classes, each a week long with 6-8 people at a time. In that short time, they thoroughly enjoyed the course and quickly learned how to apply their animation skills to Flash. Lots of new short film, character and series ideas were flying around the rooms and all were excited about the future.

So not too long ago I caught up with a few of them and they told me that due to other commitments, new dog, whatever.. they had forgotten everything they’d learned and wanted to do the course again. I had been toying with the idea of writing a Flash book but now I’ve decided to make this an eBook, not just for the animators who I know personally, but for everyone who’s ever asked me a Flash question, wanted some animation tips or emailed asking me to be their mentor.

There are many more chapters to come but you may just find the free chapter is all you need to get started. If you are one of those from the course, this chapter will bring you back up to speed pretty quick.

I know you’re wondering what the sale price will be for the remainder of the book, but so am I. I’m still undecided but let’s say I want it to be less expensive than a standard Flash Animation book in bookstores, but I also won’t sell it short. I guess it’ll be between  $20 and $40 so if you’re interested, stick around.

gnight from Phillips!!

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