‘The YuYu’ is officially launched. It’s the latest episode in Adam Phillip’s Brackenwood series, and it’s another jaw-dropper. It’s 30 frames-per-second, 3 minutes long, character animation is on the 2′s and it’s animated by one person.

‘The YuYu’ is what Adam describes as an “interlude within a larger story,” and it picks up from the end of the award-winning ‘littleFoot,’ where Bitey was first confronted by the mysterious, shape-shifting YuYus. If you recall that final scene, they’d just suggested ‘stealing’ Bitey.

Phillips is using Flash 8 to the fullest here, blurring symbols left and right – all to great effect. With that said, make sure your Flash player is up to date, or you won’t be able to see the short in it’s full glory. But the software isn’t the story here – ‘The YuYu’ is just straight-up, hand-drawn animation – and he’s delivered an incredibly nimble dancing-camera tour de force. There’s one sequence where Bitey is blazing across the countryside that is simply breathtaking – and reminiscent of Dash’s hypersonic dash through the forest in ‘The Incredibles.’

And I can’t pass up a comment on that YuYu cloud. So playful and complex. I’ve watched this short 5 times today, and I think I’ll be back tomorrow for more.

Enough of my yapping – let’s read some of Adam’s words. I pulled these quips from his message board posts…

“…more drawings than I’ve ever done in a Flash movie.”

“I’ll probably be spending a bit less time on the backgrounds for this movie because the camera is always moving and most fine detail will be lost when the movie plays. The animation, colours and effects however are deeper and more complex than my previous movies.”

“…all of the animated backgrounds (up until he leaps over the forest to look behind) are on singles, i.e. one complete background drawing for each frame. In those scenes, there is a dominant animated layer, such as the ground plane.. the other layers such as sky and forests panning past, are tweened towards the vanishing point. 98% of the character animation is on doubles, i.e. one drawing for every two frames. Where I could cut corners without compromising the animation, I did as much as possible. Throughout the movie, the yuyu cloud is about 50% on singles and 50% on doubles.”

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